Show/Hide Panel button

[maverick74]

@Zren : Ok... this is completely Off-Topic and for sure not a bug report (but more an Applet request), but since i didn't find any other way to contact you here it goes:

I don't have enough coding skills to do this, but how hard would it be to create a "button"/plasma applet that would:

1. Detect, List & allow to select (dropdown) which Plasma Panel we wish the applet to target
2. Upon click would Show or Hide the selected Panel

Would it be doable?

The intention is to create a Plasma Panel (e.g.: on the right side) where one can put the desired applets and be able to access them on a button click (ATM the best one can accomplish with Plasma natively is an autohide panel, but everytime one goes to the scrollbar it shows up... an Windows10 Sidebar-like with a button would be way more useful)

(sorry for the off-topic)

[Zren]

Sorry for taking so long. I originally went looking for a good example, but couldn't really find one.

The clock, menu, task manager, pager, etc are all "Plasma/Applets". The panel is also an applet, but it's also a "Plasma/Component" as well which means it can contain other "applets". The desktop wallapaper area is also a Component since it can contain desktop applets.

I've looked at few times to see if there was a simple good example of a component.

• plasma-framework example: There's an example in the plasma-framework repo. It's a very simple example. It lets you place a widget at (x,y) sorta like a desktop widget. You could probably rework this to attach the applets

The above is probably the best example. However I've listed all the other plasma components I could think of.

• Panel: Very complicated. It's code is broken up into 2 different repos.

• Desktop/Wallpaper area: Same as the panel, it's broken up in various places.

• Grouping Widget: Not a good example since only 1 "child" applet is visible at a time.

• System Tray Widget: This is also broken up into 2 diferent plasmoids. It also only shows 1 widget at a time making it a poor example.

  It does generate an icon for each "system tray widget" like the network icon which might be useful to look at. It doesn't use the compactRepresentation itself, but it does show an example of generating 1 Item per "child applet" in a Row/Column.

• Latte Dock: Latte is probably a more complicated example than the panel, but probably an easier to read since it's all in 1 repository.

I might try another crack at this later (my first attempt a few days ago was a wash).

[maverick74]

Hi @Zren ,

I probably did not explain my idea well enough, sorry :(.

The idea is not to create a panel - that we already have (any regular desktop panel is just perfect), the idea was to create a button that would control the hide status of a chosen panel.

A button that on Click - show panel, click again or off the panel - hide panel.

Naturally that for this to work we would need to identify the "target panel" (and probably overwrite the native autohide panel option)... And i think this would be the most difficult part (but then again, i don't understand much about it...)

[maverick74]

@Zren I've been thinking about my suggestion... I am suggesting it thinking it does not exists already.

Do you know of any such "button"?

[maverick74]

Hi @Zren I just found these two apparently abandoned plasmoids that once used to do what i want (i suppose they don't work anymore...).

Still, they might serve as an example of what i mean: https://askubuntu.com/questions/396588/set-a-hotkey-to-show-an-auto-hiding-plasma-panel :)