SUMMARY TL;DR Please add an option to disable hidden panels from automatically popping out when the pointer reaches the edge of the screen. Rationale No matter where I place the main panel, it constantly interferes with my workflow: - Bottom: The panel pops out nearly every time I try to interact with elements in the VS Code bottom bar. - Left: The panel activates almost every time I attempt to click icons in the sidebar. - Right: It often interferes with the scrollbar or graphical elements like buttons and toggles in applications. - Top: It disrupts web browsing by making it nearly impossible to click on tabs without unintentionally triggering the panel. An option to prevent the panel from popping out whenever the pointer brushes against its edge would significantly improve usability and eliminate these frustrations. Thank you so much!
But then how would it be activated?
Hi Nate! For me, using Kickoff's activation key or an associated Focus shortcut is enough. Just as Yakuake notifies you when no keybinding is assigned to pull down the terminal, a similar message could appear to inform users that they can always access the panel settings by entering Desktop Edit Mode. I might not be the average KDE user, as I'm a dynamic tiling window manager user at heart. Yet, I've been around here since KDE 3 times (which is an awful amount of time!). Maybe the biggest reason I always liked KDE so much is 1) flexibility/extensibility and 2) it takes care of the underlying infrastructure, enabling all the functionality hardware has to offer without me having to configure every bit by myself, as I used to do when I also used window managers. My workflow heavily relies on Kröhnkite NG, Virtual Desktops, Activities, and only one Plasma Panel. I have no preference between Kickoff and Krunner—I use both interchangeably. Ideally, I would keep the panel hidden all the time if it wasn't because of the bug in Qt mentioned here: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=487895#c13 Thanks again for considering my request 🫶
It's an interesting use case. We have another somewhat popular request for a "manual show" behavior controlled by another widget (Bug 158556) but to my knowledge this is the first time I've encountered this request. I'll keep it open for now and we'll see what the panel maintainer thinks.
If we do implement manual show/hide, I'd want the feature to be as simple as possible user-wise, since the panel settings and such are already quite feature heavy. In that sense, the proposal at 158556 (show/hide via a widget) is a superset of this one, since you could then set a shortcut for the show/hide widget, and that shortcut would effectively address this bug report as well. Thus, I would like to keep this proposal as part of 158556. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 158556 ***
Hi Niccolò, With the solution you mentioned, would it be possible to pop out the panel using a shortcut without needing a plasmoid on the desktop? I ask because plasma widgets have long been notoriously buggy. They often cause sustained high CPU usage by the plasma thread or outright crash the desktop. Unless plasmoids have become more reliable, I'd prefer to avoid relying on them. Best regards