For several years, the Task Bar only shows the icons of the applications once the items get narrower than some threshold, I presume for aesthetic reasons. (I mean the normal Task Bar, not the Icons Only one of course). I think I've realized why this doesn't bother most people: I guess most people the option to group windows, and combine them into a single button, enabled; since they can tell the application by the icon, there is no harm in hiding the title. However, I've always disabled window grouping/combining, so that I can get to any window with one click. And even one letter can help disambiguate windows of the same application. You could add an option whether to show the icon only when taskbar items get narrow. However, the above suggests another option that avoids cluttering the settings with another check box: always show the beginning of window titles (however little there is space for) when the "Combine into single button" option is disabled, but retain the current behavior when it's enabled. The current behavior is probably fine for those who enable that option, while those who disable it would likely to prefer to see the first letter or two of the title than to just see identical icons.
Can you attach a screenshot that shows the problematic state that you are trying to avoid with this proposed change?
Created attachment 145352 [details] Too many windows, no text on taskbar items
Created attachment 145353 [details] One fewer windows, the first 3–4+ letters of the title is shown on the taskbar items
OK, so the problem is that at a certain point when there are enough windows, the window titles disappear leaving you with only icons, but you would like for the titles (or at least, some small fragment of them) to always be visible. Do I have that right?
(In reply to Nate Graham from comment #4) > OK, so the problem is that at a certain point when there are enough windows, > the window titles disappear leaving you with only icons, but you would like > for the titles (or at least, some small fragment of them) to always be > visible. Do I have that right? Yes.
Thanks.
This became worse with Plasma 6. When the "feature" of hiding titles completely when there is relatively little space started, the threshold was around 7 letters; that is, if there was space for less than ~7 letters, the titles would be completely hidden. After a while, that threshold was reduced to ~5 letters, I guess because it bothered some people. Now it seems to be back to ~7 letters. (But I still think the right behavior would be to not have any such title hiding when window grouping is disabled.)
Now it seems like the title hiding behavior disappeared completely by plasmashell 6.0.4—I don't know if either this change or the one I reported in Comment 7 were intentional, but it now works as I'd like it.
Yup, I fixed it for 6.0.4. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 483070 ***