I was watching a video and hovering the mouse on the task manager blocks 1/3rd of the screen in height. And I don't even get to see what the terminal is doing (no preview) I think the words "pharmathan: sudo - Konsole" have to go or be smaller, because they take too much space. Reproducible: Always
See the url for the screenshot
Created attachment 99423 [details] ... ...
Something for the VDG.
Not much use to work on that at this moment from my perspective, because we have big plans for those tooltips: Instead of making them smaller, we want to make them actually useful. When we have some designs for that, we'll look what size they need to be useful.
That sounds nice Thomas, as the Task Manager maintainer I'm not very happy with the tooltips currently.
Created attachment 99604 [details] Tooltip size
Ok sorry for double-comment, this attachment system is very confusing. I added image that shows how pausing/resuming media gives different tooltip sizes for some reason. I think this is somewhat related. Plasma should cap tooltip size isntead of allowing it to be as big or as small as it desires. Now actually tooltip of every application in taskbar has different size. It is just confusing and bad looking.
Created attachment 100111 [details] Blurry app icon Since you said that you're reworking tooltips anyway (I would love that), I don't create a new issue for that and just add it as a remark here: it would be nice if you could also make them prettier. There are two major issues with the current look and feel: a) no animations which makes tooltips feel like compositing is turned off b) blurry (i.e. scaled-up) application icons when windows are minimized (see attached screenshot) Further explanation of b): icons with higher resolution definitely exist as I can see when I make the panel bigger. The tooltip still uses a scaled-down version, though. This does not happen for all applications, though. KDE apps (maybe Qt apps in general? Not sure) seem to show icons at correct sizes when windows are minimized. But icons of GTK apps (such as Chrome or Gimp) are usually scaled up and look blurry.
Please make sure that: 1) You use Plasma 5.7 for thest tests due to the fully-rewritten backend 2) You use a less broken app than Chrome for testing - in cases where we can't map the window to a system-registered app we fall back to the window icon which may not be high-res, and Chrome is notoriously bad at providing correct metadata
I'm using 5.7.1 and I tested it with Chrome and Gimp (as written above). However, Gimp also uses a different icon for the taskbar entry (provided by the Breeze icon theme, I guess) than in the tooltip (standard Gimp icon). Thunderbird seems to show the tooltip icon at a correct size. But still, even if it's just Chrome: it's such a widely-used application that there should be a fix/workaround even if it's not really KDE's fault.
Created attachment 100112 [details] Blurry Icons 2 I attached a new screenshot showing Gimp and Chrome and a very big panel. Both apps have icons with correct resolution on the panel, but both show blurry icons in their tooltips.
I think this boils down to kde not enforcing tooltip size and every application having free reign on resizing that tooltip by providing images of different size.
> But still, even if it's just Chrome: it's such a widely-used application that there should be a fix/workaround even if it's not really KDE's fault. We ship hacks for Chrome in taskmanagerrulesrc for that reason, but they invent new ways to break it from time to time.
> I think this boils down to kde not enforcing tooltip size and every application having free reign on resizing that tooltip by providing images of different size. No. Applications have no influence on the size of the Task Manager tooltips.
> I attached a new screenshot showing Gimp and Chrome and a very big panel. Both apps have icons with correct resolution on the panel, but both show blurry icons in their tooltips. Confirmed. Looks like tooltips don't use the task button icon when there is no thumbnail, but fall back to the (low-res) window icon pixmap instead.
Kai, Martin, VDG: Which way do we want to go with this? Things I can think of: 1) Evaluate on the QML side if the thumbnail is actually available (based on some sort of WindowThumbnail prop that may or may not exist yet) and substitute WindowThumbnail for an IconItem using TasksModel's deco prop in that case 2) add a fallBackIcon prop to WindowThumbnail and set TasksModel's deco prop on it, make WindowThumbnail paint that instead of the window icon (probably dumb since it bypasses a lot of IconItem smartness) 3) Figure out if WindowThumbnail could somehow try harder to get a higher-res window icon. Probably fruitless. On the other hand showing the task button icon twice in the tooltip seems pointless too. 4) Fix the tooltip animation effect to avoid the Flappy Bird-like movement and hide the entire preview when the thumb is not available
> No. Applications have no influence on the size of the Task Manager tooltips. Really? Because every application has tooltip of different length here (which is plasma 5.7), and pausing/resuming spotify via tooltip also changes length thus moving buttons from under the mouse. Height seems consistent though. By the way my taskbar is on the left edge of screen if it has any importance.
I think option 1 sounds like the best solution.
The WindowMetaData framework which is currently being developed changes the whole situation for thumbnails, anyway, doesn't it? The question really is: What do we show for applications which provide nothing? What benefit does a huge icon bring to users? When we have nothing relevant to show either via WindowMetaData or via MPRIS, I'd just show a button to close the window and that's it.
How about preview of application window? If preview is not available then window icon sounds like sane fallback until preview can be displayed. Since this is what windows does i think it is a safe bet. New users some would get what they expect too.
I agree that showing a big icon is not really helpful, especially not because there is already an icon right next to the title. A fine fix for me would also be to just make the tooltip smaller and only show the title (+ the smaller icon on the right-hand side). But having a big blurry icon whose native resolution is way too low is just a no-go.
Hey good afternoon. What are you still discussing about? Is it so hard to make the window preview smaller? I'll add an attachment with a screenshot of how windows 10 manages windows' previews. Simple and useful. I don't get it why you make your lives so hard ^_^
Created attachment 100312 [details] Windows 10 window preview See the preview window on the bottom? It shows what needs to be shown and doesn't take 1/3rd of my screen
* 1/3rd of its height
Is this still reproducible using recent Plasma versions? I don't see this behavior in 5.11. The tooltips seem to be fairly reasonably sized.
I tested previews for some apps - SMPlayer, VLC, Kate, KSysGuard, Dolphin, Discover, Chromium, Chrome, GIMP, Inkscape, PyCharm - and noticed that VirtualBox app currently has blurry icon in preview - all others apps are looking ok Plasma: 5.12.2 Apps: 17.12.2 Frameworks: 5.43.0 Qt: 5.10.1 Kernel: 4.14.20-2-MANJARO OS: Netrunner Rolling
The original issue here has definitely been fixed; tooltips for not-running apps are now nice and small. Let's track any new issues with new bugs. Thanks everyone!