Manually hidable panels coming to KDE4.
For all you retroists out there who are missing having manually-hideable panels on your desktop (or those, who like me, are sticking with kde 3.5 due to this regression), there is good news. After some discussion on a certain bug report) I have decided to try my own hand at adding this functionality. And I have now finally figured out where the necessary code resides. [View KDE online source repository here.] Work is starting (and I am beginning to learn some of the intricacies of CPP and Qt).
As outlined in the same bug report linked to above, I will implement this feature/necessity by adding a new display mode to the panel, labelled “Manually hideable”, which will make the panel behave the same as when “Always visible”, but adding two hiding buttons (or one if the panel is only connected to one side of the screen), which will then (as the name suggests) hide the panel, displaying a small button (on top of all other windows) where the panel has been hidden to. What will (probably) be missing is the option to manually set the width of the buttons, or set animation times and suck like as in 3.5, but I don’t think that is a key necessity, and it wouldn’t fit in with the rest of the idea of KDE 4.
Whether or not this change would then be incorporated into mainstream kde (assuming I get it done) is not known yet; this depends on quality of code (eek!) and whether or not the devs think this is useful.
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