Vertical panel in GNOME
I’ve been playing with various desktop GNU/Linux distributions last couple of months. I’m not exactly a newbie to Linux, I have been administering a VPS box for my hobby project for several years now, but I never managed to play with it on a desktop.
So I did. And I must say I’m very impressed. Last time I checked (FreeBSD 4 back in 2000), FLOSS desktop was mostly a geek toy, these days it is ready for the average user.
I will spare the overview of the distros that I tried, as well as my take on the KDE vs. GNOME flame war for another post, here I want to talk about one particular annoyance that I really want to see fixed.
You see, these days it’s hard not to have a wide-screen monitor sitting on your desktop. They are great for watching films and playing games but this comes at a cost — you end up with fewer vertical pixels.
Vertical space is much more important for most other tasks I do on the computer, be it browsing the web, coding or writing blog posts. And the only way to maximise it is to move the everlasting task bar sitting on the bottom of most operating systems to the left or right of the screen.
This is how it looks like in Vista and KDE. I know it takes some getting used to, but it’s worth a few days of slight disorientation. And I’m not the only one who thinks so.
The vertical layout works great in XP, Vista and KDE, but not in GNOME. I want to list here all open issues along with the links to the GNOME bug database. I guess we have all these issues because not many GNOME developers are using the vertical layout, or even aware of the benefits it can give them. I hope this post will help it, even if only a little bit.
Window List: The list of open windows is arguably the most important piece of information sitting on the panel. And the most terribly behaving in vertical layout.
First of all, the height of the window list applet is fixed, meaning the list doesn’t occupy all available vertical space.
Second, the height of the buttons that represent the open windows, stretches to fill the entire applet. The buttons should have a fixed height that depends on the font used in the buttons.
Third, after you open a few windows, the list splits to two columns and becomes irresponsible to mouse clicks. This is the most annoying bug of the three.
These issues are documented in bug 86382 that was open back in 2002! The bug has a patch, but it looks like it’s not perfect either.
Notificatioin Area: In vertical layout the notification area wastes a lot of space by placing one icon in a row. It also uses different sizes for different icons, some are really huge, e.g. 128×128. It should instead use a flow layout for icons and use the same size for all of them. This is described in bug 531371.
Quick Launch: The quick-lounge applet had a bug that made it nearly impossible to use on a vertical panel (see bug 531358). It’s fixed now in the trunk, hopefully it will be integrated into the next GNOME release.
There are other related annoyances (see bug 428943 and Ubuntu idea #1906) but I can live with them if the above issues are resolved.
July 7th, 2008 at 17:01
Got here through Google — happy to know I’m not the only one feeling the same way…
August 5th, 2008 at 20:03
I got here from the Linux Haters Blog. So you know this isn’t going to get fixed… they’ll just be like, “works for me”, or “send patches”. Good luck.
August 5th, 2008 at 21:50
Yes I know how things work in flossland, and actually I’ve sent one patch. I’ve even gone as far as buying a GTK+ book.
Thanks for wishing me luck, I definitely need some :)
August 5th, 2008 at 22:11
Suggested FOSS bug-fix:
Change user to prefer horizontal orientation.
August 5th, 2008 at 22:18
I can confirm the patch fixes it for me :)
August 6th, 2008 at 05:20
Personally, I don’t find weendoz/KDE variant of the same thing useful either. IMO it should just draw vertical buttons, icons and everything; I mean, take your laptop and rotate in clockwise by 90 degrees. Now you see perfectly good vertical panel.
August 6th, 2008 at 05:29
The problem with vertical text is that it’s hardly readable at all. Also, the height of the monitor is much less than its width, meaning it’s harder to fit everything in if vertical text is used.
On the other hand, horizontal text on a vertical panel works much better. It takes otherwise useless space of wide-screen monitors. It also can fit much more open windows, short-cuts, and other eye-candy on it than the horizontal panel.
August 6th, 2008 at 09:44
Vertical bars eat up too much of the screen estate anyways. I for one would never want to see any such on my desktop.
August 6th, 2008 at 14:23
I am quite happy putting the “Main Menu”, “Notification Area”, “Clock”, “Show Desktop Button”, “Window Selector” and individual icon launchers into a vertical panel, and having the “Window List” and “Workspace Switcher” in a horizontal panel.
(But, of course, you are right — trying to put the the “Window List” into a vertical bar does not work well in Gnome. I would not have used my two-panel scheme at all if it had worked the way I planned in the first place.)
That said, the nice thing about the Gnome-panels is that you have *way* more flexibility than the Vista panel. That fact that I can make as many as I want, and move them around if nice. I think the bugs are in the individual applets, rather than Gnome-Panel itself.
August 6th, 2008 at 18:00
Why not just have a hiding panel on the bottom/top if the gnome panel will do it? I use KDE for my desktop most of the time (Windowmaker when I want something uber-fast and light) and have a normal CRT monitor for my desk. I also have our vizio hdtv setup as a second monitor for watching movies right on the tv from the comp and I set the panel for that screen so that it auto-hides immediately after the cursor leaves it, and when the cursor is moved to the bottom edge of the screen it pops back up. Whenever we’d have a movie playing and I’d click back on my main screen to do something, the panel on the tv would come to the front and distract from the movie and this works great. Plus it’s only taking up space when I need it.
August 6th, 2008 at 22:21
@C. Conrad Cady
I agree that it’s much more flexible and it’s a good thing. The bad thing is that this flexibility introduces too many possibilities, and it’s hard to properly test them all.
I suppose there should be a balance between the number of features and their quality. I probably would not complain at all if the panels were stuck only to the top or the bottom, but if they can be docked to the side of the screen, I expect things to work.
The problem is indeed not in the panel itself but in individual applets, but these are very basic applets that everyone is expected to use. Most of them are even part of the gnome-panel sub-project.
August 6th, 2008 at 22:26
@Tim
I personally don’t like hiding panels. I want to see the information on the panel all the time without unnecessary mouse moves / key presses. But it’s a matter of preference of course.
August 7th, 2008 at 07:42
They are great for watching films and playing games but this comes at a cost — you end up with less vertical pixels.]
“FEWER” vertical pixels
August 7th, 2008 at 07:45
@James: Thanks mate!
August 8th, 2008 at 05:52
Even just checking out the clock alone knows the GNOME gods have completely abandoned vertical panel and discourage others from doing the same. Current clock sucks completely with vertical panel (yes, they want people to read text rotated 90 degrees). And they never ever considered an analog clock as something necessary. That’s quite possible if all of them uniformly use horizontal panel, thus vertical clock automatically become something only uber-tweakers would ever want to use.
(The analog clock patch I pointed to is outdated, I don’t want to modify gnome panel source code everytime after a bug fix or even normal update. It’s SO annoying and cumbersome.)
September 13th, 2008 at 02:38
There a workaround suggested here:
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-583908.html
It works great for me… Not only does it solve the task list problem but also the time/date!