Are there any way to disallow desktop files to not go under any widgets? What use-cases do people even have for files going under widgets to have it as a default behaviour?
Also my desktop files are added left-to-right in the topline, because trash floats to the top in the ocean wallpaper, (a joke).
As far as I can tell there’s no code for handling widgets interacting with file icons on the desktop when using the Folder View layout for your desktop.
This would definitely be a missing feature, though IIRC it was discussed in the past and the conclusion what that this is difficult.
If it bothers you a lot, I recommend you switch to a Desktop layout and add a Folder View widget to show the folder icons in a box - so they will not interact with other widgets - Plasma knows how to handle collisions between widgets and will not let them overlap.
Good point. But issue with FolderView are that it’s background cannot be removed (made 100% transparent). So it will look like black shade over wallpaper.
I already use FolderView in the bottom (as seen on the screenshot) for XDG folder which I moved from /home/user/ to /home/user/Personal/ (to make it cleaner from all the dot folders sitting in home dir).
There’s ongoing work to allow the user to configure widgets background to have either opaque, “shadow” or completely transparent background. I’m currently blocked on this due to lack of time, but I’ll get back to it eventually.
the desktop icons and the widgets occupy separate, non interacting, layers and there is no way other than manually keeping them separate.
if you put widgets into a panel at the edge of the screen, plasma will resize the desktop (and move the icons) so they don’t go under a panel.
Desktop icons could be made special case of widgets. They would autocreate and autodelete when file are added/removed from file system. And if you delete desktop icon widget, you delete the file with confirmation.
This way it would be even possible to make desktop icon resizable per icon.
Also this would open possibility if desktop icon are a directory, then let show sneak peek into that’s inside. Just like Android desktop folders where you click and it pops up (instead of opening full-fledged file manager).
We have window rules, but we could have widget rules as well. These autocreated desktop icon widgets could respond to widget rules, and that would dictate where new files or files depending on their state would appear on the screen, what size, etc. Photos in one corner, documents in the other. Etc.
Replacing desktop icons to desktop icon autowidgets unlocks a lot of possibilities. And would be UX backward compatible with what we have now. Also would be benefiting for PlasmaMobile as well.
