2. Arne [15/07/2007@10:36]

/me is using a vertical panel ( and a horizontal autohide one ) but alas I am not in Birmingham :-(

4. Richard [25/07/2007@05:18]

Hello.

I like using vertical panels with vertical task lists. If you try that right now, you might notice that the situation is mildly ridiculous :)

Windows has as far back as I can remember exhibited good behaviour in this regard. (In Windows, I always drag the taskbar to the right so I can see my tasks stacked.) Each task has a height to fit one line of text, they all have a consistent width, and the positioning of a task does not change as more windows open or close.

I find it more usable than having a horizontal tasklist, where tasks keep shrinking when you open more to the point of hiding the window names, or where tasks have to be grouped (doubling the clicking needed to get to them!). Also, when you have a horizontal one, the tasks "move around" as they get squished and pushed about by new windows. A vertical task bar takes up a bit more real-estate (less of a problem with wide screens), but most text that you might read (a regular function of programmes, presenting text) are much, much taller than they are wide (yay word wrapping).

Anyway, in GNOME, I once hacked the tasklist source code in libwnck a little to make my tasks boxes a constant height to make a vertical panel (with vertical tasklist!) usable.

Does your interest in vertical panels extend to the tasklist? Do you also find much of the current task box sizing code to be ridiculous and broken? (e.g. my task list never expands to the full width or height it does have available, and this causes very weird size distortions and of the task boxes (e.g. too small when there's lots of horizontal space to take up, or for the vertical, divides the task list into two columns when the list can still grow downwards.))

Anyway, I think I would like to get involved again. If any of the things I mentioned seem unexpected or weird, I would be happy to take screen shots/Theora vids of them and share those. The libwnck code has been a bit intimidating for me to grok, but if there were directed tasks that you could recommend, I could try those too. I am reluctant to write patches if they are unlikely to be merged (though I do not mind improving them - I just do not want to spend time chasing the wrong path).

Cheers!

(p.s. next up, bug Mozilla about making it easier to make the tab bar vertical (possible now with the help of an extension and a lot of chrome editing, but not nice!))

p.p.s. any ideas on why horizontal panels became the norm? Even on a 640x480 screen I prefer a vertical stack with consistent, predictable task positioning and shapping :)

p.p.p.s. and yes, I am aware of "Fensterwähler" (German name of the window selector applet that drops down a menu). It is undesirable because the open-window information is hidden until you click it.