Not tehcnically a bug but more like strong wish: Kicker main icon (panel icon) should be hightlighted while hovering cursor over it. Additionally, I noticed that icons in the favorites list also miss hightlighting. This is not the case in Kickoff launcher. Highlighting relevant icons improves the overall feeling of responsiveness of the system. Right now, the whole Kicker Application Menu (& especially the mentioned icons) feels just discrete & clumsy and somehow unfinished, not so responsive. Though *technically*, every feature works as intended. If this highlighting feature is discussed and rejected before, at least make it an option in the Kicker launcher configuration menu ("Application Menu Settings") so everyone can individually decide whether to enable the highlighting or not. I remember that lack of highlighting was already an issue in Plasma 4, and was the only reason I've never really used (Homerun) Kicker as my app launcher. However, I really love its simplicity and prefer the layout over the default Kickoff launcher.
The icon in the panel does highlight when you hover it, it might be a bit hard to see due to the icon being all black. As for the highlight in favorites strip, I agree that they should highlight on hover and I'll prepare a patch to fix this.
Okay, thank you for the reply! I've set a custom SVG image as the main launcher icon (Arch Linux Logo with blue blackground). I've also used the same image with Kickoff and the difference between a normal and highlighted launcher icon is very, very visible.
Ok, the difference why you won't get a highlight then might be that in Kickoff you go through the icon dialog to choose an icon which is displayed using Plasma's IconItem whereas Kicker lets you choose a custom path directly and then uses a regular Image item (as back when this was implemented IconItem didn't support non-square icons).
Git commit db297ab5acb93f88c238778e8682effe3032bf4f by Kai Uwe Broulik. Committed on 20/03/2017 at 11:42. Pushed by broulik into branch 'Plasma/5.8'. [Kicker] Fix highlighting favorites ToolTipArea steals mouse events from the MouseEventListener. Differential Revision: https://phabricator.kde.org/D5064 M +1 -1 applets/kicker/package/contents/ui/SideBarItem.qml https://commits.kde.org/plasma-desktop/db297ab5acb93f88c238778e8682effe3032bf4f
Thanks Kai! Favorites menu items work now. +1 Launcher icon still lacks visible highlighting. I consider the issue partially fixed (but not completely). P.S. Thanks for the explanation of why the launcher icon may miss visible highlighting.
I'll look into the other half of the ticket soon.
This needs some further work in IconItem to allow us to do applet size hints similar to Image does - I've got a patch coming up, and one to Kicker to port it to IconItem.
Thanks, Eike! Background story for this "bug" issue is as follows (just my thoughts): As the current KDE version offers various launcher alternatives, I think making similar functions such as highlighting same icons for these launcher (Kickoff, Kicker etc.) would improve the desktop experience & make the experience overall more coherent/united for KDE end-users. If one launcher does highlight critical icons but the other one does not, well, that's somehow broken desktop experience. Anyway. I'm happy you're working on this issue, I look forward to it being resolved. Take your time writing the necessary changes.
Patches to plasma-framework and Kicker under review: https://phabricator.kde.org/D5160 https://phabricator.kde.org/D5162
Just tested the patches. Highlighting works as expected with them. Thank you so much for your trouble and fast response! Finally after these years Kicker can be used as a perfect replacement for Kickoff without suffering from any of these little annoyances. Hopefully your patches will be implemented soon. I consider the issue as fixed. Thank you again!
Git commit b80a8aa51456804e25385d6386df8afac1d762cb by Eike Hein. Committed on 24/03/2017 at 12:41. Pushed by hein into branch 'master'. Port custom image mode to IconItem. Summary: Simplifies compact representation to always using IconItem, now that IconItem supports displaying non-square image sources. Fixes missing hover highlight effect for custom image launcher buttons. Depends on D5160 in plasma-framework to work correctly, enabling it to learn image source aspect ratio from the IconItem's implicit size. A good follow-up would be aligning Kickoff and Kicker compact representation sizing behavior and config UI now. Reviewers: #plasma, broulik Subscribers: plasma-devel Tags: #plasma Differential Revision: https://phabricator.kde.org/D5162 M +33 -63 applets/kicker/package/contents/ui/CompactRepresentation.qml https://commits.kde.org/plasma-desktop/b80a8aa51456804e25385d6386df8afac1d762cb
@Fincer: Thx!