Plasma 6 Task Manager: dynamic entry width, mixed labels and icons-only, show apps on both monitors

Help
1

I’ve been using Plasma for about 6mo (full-time for about a month), and while I overall like the experience I feel like there’s a lot of wasted space in Task Manager. Entries are all the same width, leading to some entries having lots of blank space while others are cut off. For example, in the screenshot below, half of Steam’s entry is empty, while Dolphin and Home Assistant both are cut off.
Question 1: Can you set Task Manager to avoid empty space in entries?

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Second, I generally want the window title listed in Task Manager, but for some I only want the icon. For example, I usually have 4-5 Firefox windows open, several Konsole windows, etc, and I want to be able to differentiate between them at a glance. Therefore, I want to see their titles in Task Manager, ruling out the Icons-only Task Manager. However, for other apps, I generally only have one window open (e.g. Signal, Steam, Discover, etc.), so the icon is all the info I need.

While I can make an app disappear from the taskbar entirely with a window rule, it doesn’t seem to be possible to make it show up only in an Icons-only Task Manager. It also doesn’t appear to be possible (issue 6578 discusses this, but I’m not allowed to include links) to set a blank window title with a window rule (and even if I could, issue #1 would leave me with a huge, blank entry). The only thing I could think is if I could do some combo of A) hiding the taskbar entry with a window rule and B) making a taskbar-like widget that maximizes and minimizes that one app with KWin scripts.
Question 2: Can anyone think of a cleaner/easier solution?

Finally, I would like certain apps to show in the taskbars of both monitors.
Question 3: Is this possible?

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Anyone? I can’t be the only one who wants to trick out their Plasma.

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No, these are not possible to do at the moment.

You probably wouldn’t even want for task width to be determined by window title length anyway, because windows can change their titles anytime and this would trigger a re-layout, causing task widths to change and destroying your muscle memory.

4

Ok, thanks for the clarification.

While it’s true that title length changing can be an issue, 90% of the time I’m alt-tabbing or using Krunner to get to a window, so I am not building any muscle memory based on task width. I just want to be able to see at a glance what I have open. (Yes, this can be seen in the top-left corner’s overview effect, but it’s harder for me to quickly skim than a nice linear taskbar.)
I actually like the way Windows does this - there is a moderate maximum task width for uniformity, while any items shorter than that will be shrunk to save space. It would be cool if the user could configure maximum and minimum widths to improve on this behavior.

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In that case, is there a way to change the width? Thanks :slight_smile:

1 Like
6

Seconded! Come to think of it, just being able to reduce the width would help with many of my problems.