Mike
McBride
Jost
Schenck
2002-02-12
3.00.00
KDE
KControl
panel

# Panel

## Introduction

The &kde; panel (often referred to as &kicker;) is the bar that you'll usually find at the bottom of the screen when you start up &kde; for the first time. The panel gives you quick access to applications and makes it easier for you to organize your desktop. Using the &kde; panel you can for example

- launch applications using the K menu or the application buttons

- switch desktops using the panel's pager applet

- switch active windows, and minimize or maximize them

- browse directory using the browser menu functionality

- access panel applets that extend the panel's functionality, offering for example mixers, clocks or a system monitor

## Position

In the Position tab you can configure some basic functionality of the &kde; panel (&ie; functionality you'd find in other panel applications as well; later we'll come to the more interesting features).

In the Location frame you can choose which screen border the panel should be attached to. Please note that usually the available space is used more efficiently if the panel is aligned horizontally, &ie; attached to the top or bottom screen border. If you want to play around with different settings you can change the panel's position even easier by dragging the panel from one border to the other.

You are not limited to a panel in the corner of the screen. You can choose to have it aligned Left, Center, or Right. For example, you could emulate a CDE style panel by setting it to centered and about 75&percnt; of the screen width.

The panel's size can be Tiny, Small, Medium, Large or Custom. In Custom mode, you can resize &kicker; by grabbing the edge with the mouse, and dragging. Depending on which applets you use you may find that some applets work better at different panel sizes.

You can also set the panel to be less than the desktop height or width. Use the slider, or set a percentage directly in the spinbox.

As you might imagine, this will result in &kicker; sometimes having more entries than it can fit into the space you have allowed it. In this case, you will find your panel has scrollbuttons on the end, and you need to scroll the panel to see all of it.

The Expand to fit required size checkbox will enable &kicker; to always take enough space to display all it's icons, even if this is more than the percentage you have set to be used.

Note that if you do this, you then can still set a smaller percentage than the amount of space &kicker; requires to show all the currently visible items, but it will be ignored. If you want to make &kicker; smaller, you should reduce it's size above in the Panel Size section.

## Hiding

Depending on your screen resolution you may find that the panel takes away too much of your precious screen real estate. To save screen space, the panel offers an auto hide feature. When this feature is enabled, the panel will hide when the mouse cursor has not been moved over it for a configurable amount of time. If you move the mouse to the panel's screen border it will show up again. Check the Enable automatic hide option in the Automatic Hide frame to enable this feature. Using the Delay in seconds slider you can configure the amount of time the panel will wait before it hides.

When the panel's hide buttons are enabled you'll see a button on the right hand side of the panel (by default), with an arrow pointing to the screen border. If you click on this button, the panel will slide away in that direction. After that, you'll see just a show button in that corner, which will make the panel show again.

The default setting is to have only Enable right/bottom hide button checked. You can check the other box to Enable left/top hide button. You can have both hide buttons enabled at once, or you can turn both of them off.

Use the slider to set the size of the hide buttons.

Using the Manual Hide Animation (for the hide buttons) and Auto Hide Animation (for the auto hide functionality) options you can configure whether the panel will softly slide away or just disappear. You can enable or disable both animations using the Enable options and you can change the speed of the animation using the sliders.

## Look & Feel

Using the Look & Feel tab you can configure the panel's overall appearance.

You can choose to have tooltips appear when your mouse button is over an icon, by enabling the Show tooltips option. You can also have the icons themselves zoom out when the mouse is over them, with the Enable icon zooming option.

The &kde; panel supports so-called tiled buttons. This means that the buttons shown on the panel will be drawn using configurable images. To enable button tiling, check the Enable background tiles option in the Buttons tab. Then you can configure tiles for certain kinds of buttons.

For every kind of panel button there's a frame offering an Enabled option to enable or disable tiled images. If tiles are enabled for this kind of button, you can choose a tile in the combo box below and the box on the right will show a preview of this tile.

The Background Image is a picture that will be used to draw the panel's background, just like you can use a picture for the desktop background. Check the Enable background image option to enable this feature. You can specify an image file in the line edit box below or choose one by clicking on the Browse button. You'll see a preview of the selected picture on the right.

## Menus

In the Menus tab you can configure the panel menu's behavior. This affects the K menu you will often use to launch applications, the browser menus you can use to access directories and other menus like the recent documents menu.

The K Menu Layout frame offers you some options to configure the K menu's functionality. The Show "Bookmarks" submenu and Show "Recent Documents" submenu options will enable submenus showing your konqueror bookmarks and the last documents you've opened using &kde; applications respectivly. The Show "Quick Browser" submenu option will enable a browser menu.

Show side image will add a small image to the side of the K menu. This is on by default.

Merge different menu locations will show all applications in the same directories, regardless of where the corresponding configuration files are stored: for example, enabling this option will show system wide applications in your Applications menu as well as you own ones. If you'd disable this option, there would be one applications menu for the whole system and one in a submenu containing only your personal entries.

The menu cache is a feature that can make the panel's menus appear faster on screen: instead of reading the menu information from disk every time you access a menu, the panel will remember menu entries after accessing the menus for the first time. However, depending on the amount of memory available to your system, you might want this cache to be cleared after some time. Check the Clear menu cache option if you want the cache to be cleared after some time. You can configure the amount of time after which the cache will be cleared using the slider below.

In the Browser Menus frame you can configure whether the panel's browser menus will show hidden files or not (hidden files on unix systems are those whose filenames begin with a dot) as well as how many files at most will be shown in a browser menu. The latter option may be especially useful if you have a rather small screen resolution, as then the browser menus will quickly fill up your screen when you browse directories containing many files.

The quick start section in the K menu offers quick access to programs you have used often or recently. In the "Quick Start" section contains frame you can choose whether this section will show the most recently or the most frequently used programs. Using the option Max number of "Quick Start" entries you can configure how many programs the quick start section will remember.

## Applets

Applets are small plugins that extend the pager's functionality. &kde; comes with some applets but they may be provided by third parties as well. Panel applets can be started using two different ways: internal or externally. While internal is the preferred way to load applets, this can raise stability or security problems when you are using poorly programmed third-party applets. To address these problems, applets can be marked trusted. You might want to configure the panel to treat trusted applets different from untrusted ones. Your options are:

- Load only trusted applets internal: All applets but the ones marked trusted will be loaded using an external wrapper application.

- Load startup config applets internal: The applets shown on &kde; startup will be loaded internally, others will be loaded using an external wrapper application.

- Load all applets internal: will load all applets internally, regardless of whether they're trusted or not.

For stability and security reasons, we recommend using one of the first two options and that you mark only those applets as trusted that come with the &kde; base packages.

To mark applets trusted or untrusted you can move them from one of the shown listboxes to the other. Just try selecting an applet in the list of trusted applets and click the >> button. This will move the selected applet to the other list, while clicking the << button will move the selected applet of the list of available applets to the list of trusted ones.

## Extensions

&kicker; has many extensions, which you normally add by Right clicking on the panel and choosing Add Extension, and choosing an item. Extensions are things like child panels, an external taskbar instead of (or as well as) the one embedded in the panel, and much more.

You cannot add extensions in this page of the module, but you can configure them. The options on this page are disabled unless you have added a &kicker; extension.

The options available are the same as those for locating the main &kicker; panel, on the Position tab of this dialog.

You can configure where on the screen the extension should be (Left, Right, Top or Bottom).

You can also configure if it has hide buttons visible, if it should auto hide, and if so, how much delay before it hides itself.

These options are configurable on a per extension basis, so you can have different options for each one.

## Section Author

This section written by: Jost Schenck jost@schenck.de

Minor update by Mike McBride mpmcbride7@yahoo.com

Some new options added by Lauri Watts lauri@kde.org