Panel icon sizes in KDE SC 4.5

Functional Programming in C++

Published by Ivan Čukić in the KDE development section, on 28 May 2010

There were a lot of complaints when we decided to limit the size of icons placed on panels in plasma to 32x32 pixels.

The reasoning behind limiting the size were requests from users who use vertical panels - vertical panels are usually made wider then standard panels, and icons would grow to 300x300 pixels taking up most of the space on the panel.

Putting a maximum size for icons was a good decision generally, but the bad side of it was that the new size was hard-coded. There was an option in the system settings to change sizes of icons, but setting the size for panel icons was disabled.

Now, thanks to a patch by Mike Kasick, this option is enabled and it works. Mike is one of the best types of users - although he isn’t a Plasma contributor (as far as I know - no SVN account) he sent us a patch, and responded to all of our suggestions with revised versions.

In the end, Aaron and myself adapted the proposed patch a bit to better fit the rest of Plasma, and it entered the SVN so it is on its way to KDE SC 4.5.

In KDE SC 4.5, the option is located in System Settings -> Application Appearance -> Icons -> Advanced -> Panel

Astreek
@<a href="#comment-19687" rel="nofollow">Ivan Čukić</a>: Ok :-) I understand now. Thank you for your reply.
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Dr. Roy Schestowitz, Ian Cylkowski. Ian Cylkowski said: Icons in #Plasma panel for #KDE 4.5 now configurable. https://cukic.co/blog/2010/05/28/panel-icon-sizes-in-kdesc-4-5/ [...]
Elkin
NICE!!
Jacob R
So that was actually a FEATURE in KDE 4.4! I thought it was a bug.
Ivan Čukić
@<a href="#comment-19610" rel="nofollow">Jacob R</a>: Not a feature - it was a bug-fix :)
Ivan Čukić
@<a href="#comment-19614" rel="nofollow">arwa</a>: Use-case?
@<a href="#comment-19625" rel="nofollow">Fri13</a>: Ok, I was a bit unclear.
It has nothing to do with scaling of the icon.
People tend to have larger vertical panels than horizontal ones simply because taskbar, clock... take more horizontal space than vertical.
So in order for the taskbar to be usable in a vertical panel, people make panels (for example) 150 or more pixels wide. Then, icons get enlarged to 150x150.
So, if you have three icons, for example one for the menu and two for the apps you often use, they would take 450px of vertical space - which is a waste.
That is the reason the limit was introduced (per users' requests, that is, bug reports).
> When you scale the panel bigger, some of the > icons, like kickoff, jump to smaller than 32px.
That can be considered as a bug.
Morty
Definitely a bug, the one adding it could not have been thinking very clearly.
To fix a corner case(vertical panels) the common case was broken(horizontal panels). There must be seriously more users having or trying to re-size a vertical panel to more than 32 pixel, than there are users with a vertical panel. If you for instance want double icon row in the system tray, you need about 50pixels for the panel.
It could have been handled easily in at least to ways. - Set the limit to a sane size for vertical panels 64x64 or 128x128, rather than the crippled 32x32. - Or only impose the limit when the panel is vertical, not causing a regression for anyone using a horizontal panel.
arwa
Shouldn't this be a setting for each panel? So you can configure a horizontal and a vertical panel with different icon sizes?
Karellen
@<a href="#comment-19614" rel="nofollow">arwa</a>: +1 to this.
Ivan Čukić
@<a href="#comment-19636" rel="nofollow">Morty</a>: I have no intention in arguing about that, and what could have been done, etc.
<b>Any further attempt in replicating discussions already held on bugs.kde.org will be dealt by the manual spam filter.</b>
Fri13
What is the problem what disallows to use scaling for the panel so the closest size of the icon will be shown?
How it is possible that icons would be 300x300 on vertical panel but not on horisontal?
I never have liked how the panel can not have bigger than 32x32 icons. When you scale the panel bigger, some of the icons, like kickoff, jump to smaller than 32px.

Hopefully as fast as possible we really would get true scalable icons with SVG. If just someone would start working the SVG engine so all the icons would be SVG and we would not need to care about pixmaps anymore. (yes, there is problems like 16x16 icons need to be designed different way so you can see them. But on such size, the pixmap could be used, otherwise the SVG).
Aaron Seigo
@Morty: guess who dealt with the exact same issues in kicker? :)
it's not just vertical vs horizontal, though that is one of the issues and a common source of feedback on the matter.
there are also two "classes" of horizontal panel users: those who want ginormous icons that are the same width as the height of the panel, and those who want slim icons.
i heard from both sets of people and all their reasons (ranging from accessibility to aesthetics and all lands between :) and the decision then was to honor both this setting as well as a "conserve space" hidden option that was defaulted to true.
it never became unhidden because it never really was an issue for the overwhelming majority of people.
i've been around this issue many times over the years, and this approach tends to work well.
as for making this a per-panel setting, i doubt that will happen since most settings of this sort, where pixels are twiddled differently here or there with little added value, are hard to impossible to justify in terms of code complexity and configuration UI overhead.
arwa
Hi Ivan, "use case?"... Well to be honest I am not really sure how the icons will behave and which icons sizes you can configure with the new option. But as you have described yurself, v-panels need another size as h-panels. Because I am using both, v+h-panels, it might be interesting to set the icons sizes individually.
I am not sure if this touches the same topic: Currently I have the problem, that many plasmoids/Icons are not usable in the v-panel. I gave it a bigger width (maybe 300 pixel?) so that the task-manager can be used quite well. But other plasmoids that only display with an icon are either very big in height, or they are very small, but cannot be arranged in multi columns. I always wanted to search if an feature request exists for this, but I will do it not before I am really sure what I want and how to describe the feature-
Astreek
in reply to "use case": I thought KDE was more about a wider range of options in configuring things on the desktop. But I think that, "if you don't find that , then that additional option should not be added", is something not nice. Not all the users that are not programmers think the same as you. Some people want there desktop in one way others don't.
Or is that only because you will not spend time in something that does not convince you? This would be understandable.
regards
Astreek
@<a href="#comment-19671" rel="nofollow">Astreek</a>: Something went wrong with the other post...
Here is the right one:
regards@<a href="#comment-19634" rel="nofollow">Ivan Čukić</a>: in reply to "use case": I thought KDE was more about a wider range of options in configuring things on the desktop. But I think that, "if you don't find that 'use case', then that additional option should not be added", is something not nice. Not all the users, that are not programmers think the same as you. Some people want there desktop in one way others don't.
Or is that only because you will not spend 'your' time in something that does not convince you? This would be understandable.
regards
P.D. Shouldn't/Couldn't a preview button be added?
Ivan Čukić
@<a href="#comment-19651" rel="nofollow">arwa</a>: Not really a use-case for different sizes... As for the columns, that would be a nice thing to have. There is a grid container plasmoid which would make this possible but I have no idea what is the state of it.
@<a href="#comment-19672" rel="nofollow">Astreek</a>: It is not a problem about spending time for something that I have no benefit from (if you recall, I made Kickoff use KRunner for searching although I have never used Kickoff myself).
The problem is mainly what Aaron said "hard to impossible to justify in terms of code complexity and configuration UI overhead".

<i>"I thought KDE was more about a wider range of options in..."</i>
That is somewhat true, but in KDEsc4 we went for wider set of options as long as those are usable by more than 5 persons in the world. :) (a rather good example - spacing between icons in gwenview setting which existed in KDE3)
p.s. I'm not that fond of installing too many WP plugins since those screwed with my blog a couple of times now.