Vertical panel in GNOME
by Alexander Kojevnikov
UPDATE 2009-09-06: Read the follow-up post
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.
Got here through Google — happy to know I’m not the only one feeling the same way…
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.
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 :)
Suggested FOSS bug-fix:
Change user to prefer horizontal orientation.
I can confirm the patch fixes it for me :)
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.
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.
Vertical bars eat up too much of the screen estate anyways. I for one would never want to see any such on my desktop.
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.
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.
@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.
@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.
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
@James: Thanks mate!
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.)
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!
I like gnome, and I like having a vertical panel; however, gnome’s vertical panel is going to deflect me to KDE soon if it’s not implemented correctly. I suspect that the vertical layout has never been looked at at all by the development team. it’s just simply a re-orientation, 90 degree rotation of the horizontal panel. A vertical panel should give a better read-out of what application windows are open when the vertical panel width is wide enough, the full name of the application can be shown entirely, unlike the horizontal panel which when lots of windows are open, you only see the icons, and you may have to click through each one to find the target.
Also, gnome forum has no suggestion/feedback box.
Dunno why Gnome guys insist in ignoring theyr users. The “bug” was reported since 2002. They also don’t want to insert a rename function in the save-dialog. These functions are available for 15 years or more in other OS and DE. I don’t belive they are so unskilled, that they are unable do to that, so I think they are just nearsighted.
The win7 vertical pan pretty much kicks the ass of any other vertical panel, maybe you should just use that :P
I heartily agree & am rather relieved to find that it’s not just me.
Looking at Brainstorm, Bugzilla & so on, though, I’m not holding out much hope. I might be off to Xfce myself!
Also, since the vertically-oriented window-list will be rather wide, it’s important to be able to place other windows on top of it.
In general, Gnome panels need to have a “always on top” enable/disable feature.
KDE vertical task manager was the only reason why I chose KDE.
Can you believe that? I avoid GNOME just because of the badly-behaved window list.
well.. it’s like I thought!
Good news!
There is a patch available that fixes the broken behavior; it’s available here:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=86382#c132
In the comments below, at that same page, there are instructions on how to apply the patch. I have applied it and it works fine. (Only glitch so far is that if you turn off the panel’s “expand” option, it behaves as if it was still on… but then again, I never turn “expand” off.)
@Miguel: I’m using the patch right now, so far so good.
You may also be interested in the patch that fixes the notification area applet: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=531371
@Alexander, many thanks! I’ll test it out as well.
Meanwhile, could you help me with something related to this? I noticed that everytime I restart the session, I have to “sudo ldconfig” and restart gnome-panel so that the patched library’s behaviour takes place again. What should I do to make the patch to libwnck permanent, so to speak? Thanks in advance…
@Miguel:
It works for me even after reboot. Did you `sudo make install` it? If you didn’t you will also need to reconfigure it with –prefix=/usr (supposing you are using Ubuntu), then make && make install.
@Alexander, I did “sudo make install”. But I had not used the “–prefix” switch (and I am using Ubuntu). I tried configuring again, using that switch, and then installing again. But I still lose the patched behavior every time I reboot.
I googled around, and got the suspicion that /etc/ld.so.conf.d/ might help me. The files inside it list directories where ldconfig should look for. I tried once with “/usr/lib/gnome-panel”, but it didn’t work. I’ll ask around a bit more.
And thanks for the other patch, it really helps! It’s a pity, though, that the icons have different behaviors: some stretch, some stack, and there seems to be no easy way of setting that. I guess that’s probably some tough standardizing work yet to be done.
[...] happy to report that the subject is mostly [...]
gnome needs to pay attention to all directions. the vertical display is totally unacceptable.
The gnome panel is a joke compared to KDE’s, but the whole desktop environment is basically like this which is why I haven’t looked at gnome for some time now. Actually gnome hasn’t changed since I last looked at it, about a year ago!
I’ve been using Gnome for a years and since “wide screen” displays I had to switch vertical Gnome bar. I need more vertical pixels for my terminal windows (80×60) and that was one way to get room.
But Gnome does not work well enough. I have not used KDE for a years but maybe I’ll take a try again.
Or rotate my display vertical and keep Gnome bar horizontal? No I don’t. Laptop is difficult to use that way and watching TV on desktop computer will be quite funny ;-)
I have been trying to switch to linux for years but I’ve not been able drop windows for good until now. The main reason I didn’t switch before (besides netflix requiring evil Silverlight DRM) is that I feel windows, and especially win 7, handles the vertical taskbar properly while gnomes panels do not.
Now I use KDE. Its vertical task bar doesn’t function quite as well as win7, but I can live with it. I am sure the Gnome developers are aware that launching and switching between apps is the most important function of the GUI. The elements of the GUI that handle those functions should be able to work the way people want them to. The fact that they refuse (ignoring the bug since 2002 is refusing) to acknowledge and a large and growing segment of users boggles me.
This will only become more of an issue with 16×9 aspect ratio LCD’s flying off the shelves. I have kept searching for a way to make it work but there doesn’t seem to be any good solution so far besides KDE. For now I just have to get over that fact that I like gnome better in every way except the one that matters most.
It doesn’t, sound like gnome devlopers are waking up anytime soon. Are they not using widescreen monitors too? We need the option for usable vertical taskbars, plain and simple. This isn’t rocket science, it’s ignorance on their part. This is why I stick with KDE ….. but I’d rather use Gnome.
This won’t be fixed, right? It’s incredible how many years have passed.
I had been using vertical panel since win98 until I finally switched to Ubuntu. Too bad this messy gnome thing is not going to be fixed. Going KDE would be a menace. Let’s force gnome devs have 1600×400 monitors! :)