Linux This is why you gotta love Free software.

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vishalrao

vishalrao

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Ever since Win7 and KDE 4.2 were available I started placing my taskbar vertically to the left of my widescreen LCD since it's the trendy wave of the future.

On Win7 it works/looks great but on KDE 4.2 the icons were of small size and the text was hardly visible with only a couple of letters being shown as you can see in the following screenshot.



I couldn't find a setting in KDE to change it and even posted a suggestion to the KDE Brainstorm forum section. But this was really annoying me. What if they reject the suggestion? What to do in the mean time anyway?

Browsed the online KDE source repository and found this file: trunk/KDE/kdebase/workspace/plasma/applets/tasks/abstracttaskitem.cpp

Downloaded the Kubuntu source packages and edited two functions in the said file. In the function "iconRect()" commented out the line where the icon size was being set to one-third. In the function "drawTextLayout()" simply short-circuited it by returning immediately without doing any text drawing.

And well, voila! I now have it the way I like with large icons and no text similar to the Win7 taskbar:



Some icons still are of small size like for VLC and OpenOffice, but I'm hoping either the KDE developers implement my suggestion or I can continue to dig into the code!

This felt like the "tremendous sense of empowerment" one of the guests in the documentary film "Revolution OS" was talking about.

Open Source and Free software FTW!
 
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Nice to see you got it fixed ! I am really pissed that Gimp new interface didn't work with Kwin and compiz :@ Wonder why Gimp developer choose a restricted platform :|

Anyways I posted a bug which was marked duplicate and I still don't see any improvement.. I guess its time to mail Aron :P

KDE 4.3 looking too good :) Weather wallpaper, and plethora of nice addon and more importantly this Win7 looks will be scrapped :P
 
Yes KDE 4.3 will be another good release. They're steadily adding features/fixes like KGrubEditor, skype support in Kopete, KWin decorations with alpha-blending (for Windows AERO glass like support :P), hopefully a proper network manager and what not...
 
vishalrao said:
Ever since Win7 and KDE 4.2 were available I started placing my taskbar vertically to the left of my widescreen LCD since it's the trendy wave of the future.
Click to expand...

Why :huh:

If one has been using it in its usual place for the last 15 years, how do you see ppl changing ?

Isn't the fact that the horizontal has more screen estate than the vertical. a deciding factor ;)
 
I'm now starting to prefer taskbar vertical on the side so that you get maximum vertical space for your apps/docs/browser. My LCD doesnt move from landscape to portrait orientation else i would have simply done that :)

edit: i only run 3-4 apps usually which easily fit as you can see in the first screenshot. the second screenshot i just opened a bunch of windows to see if all icons were showing large size... i'd read a blog (official win7 i think) where they talked about vertical taskbar since widescreen LCD sales are the mainstream now...
 
There is a thought i had, do the taskbar's icons have flyout menus, think like bookmark folders in ur web browser, if so this might make more sense in a vertical orientation.

Otherwise....
 
Yay, another one joining this so called "wave of the future" :ohyeah:

blr_p said:
There is a thought i had, do the taskbar's icons have flyout menus, think like bookmark folders in ur web browser, if so this might make more sense in a vertical orientation.

Otherwise....
Click to expand...

Yes, the icons have context menus (right-click) to control grouping or moving to other desktops etc. Plus they also have popups to show the full title and with compositing (desktop effects) enabled they also popup tiny full-window previews like Win7.

There is already code in KDE that controls the directions these popups slide out... if the taskbar is at the bottom it will slide up, if at the top it will slide down, and in my case it slides out to the right, so no issues here :)
 
vishalrao said:
... if the taskbar is at the bottom it will slide up, if at the top it will slide down, and in my case it slides out to the right, so no issues here :)
Click to expand...

Thats the point i'm getting at, seeing a popup slide to the right (or left) is much more natural then sliding up or down.

This is the main reason for a vertical taskbar over a horizontal one :)
 
* Part 2 of "You gotta love Free software" :D

This time it's about the theme/style. I use the "QtCurve" style on KDE 4.2 which I like much better than the default Oxygen style, except for Oxygen's progress bar look which is very nice. Wanted to modify the QtCurve style so that it uses Oxygen's progress bar and tried looking around the themes folders thinking it would be a simple matter of copying over some files from the Oxygen folder to the QtCurve folder and it would just work. But I couldn't find anything in the themes/styles folders and STFW/JFGI didn't help!

What to do?! This is supposed to be "Free" software with a capital "F" where "Free" means "Freedom" gawd dammit!

So, again, browsed the online KDE source repository and realised the Oxygen style is actually C++ code! See Index of /branches/KDE/4.2/kdebase/runtime/kstyles/oxygen

Apparently this makes theming very powerful but also very difficult because programmers are rarely also artists and

artists are rarely also programmers.

Oh well, this wasn't going to be as easy as I thought. Downloaded sources for both the QtCurve (from kde-look.org)

and Oxygen styles. Browsed through them and got a rough idea of where the progress bar was being rendered. Thought about simply copying the relevant sections of code but it still looked like a bit of work and error prone for a noob like me.

At first tried to modify the CMake files to include a link from the qtcurve library to the oxygen library so that the right rendering functions could be called. It was giving an error like "cannot make target oxygen required by qtcurve" even though there was no need to compile it, since it was already built, bah!

So finally, being totally lazy about it, simply copied the entire oxygen source as a subdirectory of qtcurve and

included the header files. Then in the section where progress bar is drawn simply created an entire OxygenStyle object on the stack and called its functions!

And tada! The style is patched just the way I like it, uh huh uh huh.

Very noobish and ugly way of doing it, but it looks so pretty :D

Before:



After:

 
For the first part, Stasks plasmoid should have sufficed.

For the second, Oxygen is the best thing on a computer desktop ever designed, Just have to complement it with a proper Font(Droid) and Colours(Karma) ;)

And the 'After' isn't pretty, but I commend your hacking skills :)
 
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Thanks. Yes stasks does look fancy and should do the job. I have to test it with vertical plasma panel though...

[youtube]WxeIU-rrSoY[/youtube]

And I doubt I'll keep the progressbar changes, too much hassle for a little thing :)
 
Just installed stackes and its is good but need to get used to it for working :P

Initially impression are on the lower side though :P It doesn't works well for my needs but its a very good alternative to Task List :)
 
Well I just now installed it and it works smooth for me with a nice light effect and all. People also recommended stasks in the KDE forums when I posted about "square tasks in vertical task bar" but didn't work for me at that time. What a waste of my time :D
 
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