Please add zoom effect for icon only task manager

Brainstorm
1

The only thing missing for kde to have a dock in my opinion is the icons zooming bigger and smaller on hover. Everything else already works for using a second panel as a dock in my opinion. Just missing this one effect. Crystal dock is interesting, but newer versions only work on wayland, and plank while visually appealing is quite buggy (closed apps still appear as open, window hiding unreliable at times, etc…) and seems abandoned.

So, I’ve personally decided to just move to a second panel using panel-colorizer and icons only task manager but I miss the zoom. I know it’s a trivial thing for some people, but it feels much more dock-like if that makes sense.

2 Likes
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I forgot something. This applet also needs a way to only show pinned apps. Then it would be a complete dock-like applet.

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Hi - just for reference, this isn’t something that the Plasma maintainers intend to build: 495100 – Zoom-in effect like macOS dock

This would need to be something built by someone with the time, ability, and interest to do so as a third-party Plasma widget.

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Oh, that sucks. Okay, well thanks for the update.

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It would be cool to have a horizontal expansion when mousing over items that’s been truncated by ellipsizing.

you could fork the task manager plasmoid and stuff it into some AI, I’ve gotten a couple of tweaks done this way. It should know how to do it, there are loads dock clones in AS3 and javascript out there.

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Yeah, I’ve been trying with ai, but it doesn’t really ever seem to work lol

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I was experimenting with something similar a while ago. But haven’t worked on it since.

zoomTest

3 Likes
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Let’s not give up! Let’s fight for Latte! Please consider using your knowledge and expertise for Latte!

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it can’t do it all but it can help.

for example it couldn’t work out how to get rid of the am/pm text on the clock, but it wrote the code I used to get rid of it once I’d worked out what the logic needed to be.

certainly it’s not a complete solution yet.

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This is probably a way for it to become feasible. A major objection to zooming the icons in the past has been how it shifts other ones out of the way, which is a usability disaster (click targets become unpredictable). Your prototype here elegantly avoids that!

1 Like
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@luisbocanegra This is nice. I didn’t notice the video. How do I get this? Could you share the applet code? Or is this part of the latte-dock rewrite or something?

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It’s my partial port of FancyTasks applet for Plasma 6 that I did a while ago.

The hover zoom attempt is this commit WIP hover zoom · luisbocanegra/FancyTasks@a79b866 · GitHub

1 Like
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@luisbocanegra Okay, so I downloaded the repo and applied the patch, but I cannot find it in my applets after a reboot. Also, the .tar.gz file that was created seems corrupted. I got this error when installing/building:

kf.package: Invalid metadata for package structure "Plasma/Applet"
Package type "Plasma/Applet" not found
Successfully installed /home/user/Downloads/FancyTasks-plasma6/release/FancyTasks.tar.gz

I see the data in ~/.local/share/alexankitty.fancytasks, but cannot find it to add to panel. I tried renaming the tar.gz to zip and adding it that way, but couldn’t get it to work. I do have kirigami2 installed. Is this applet for plasma 5? I’m running plasma 6 so maybe that’s why? Although repo says plasma 6 so that doesn’t make sense, and I downloaded the data zip from that branch so I don’t know. Any ideas?

Edit (not sure if relevant): I went into the release folder and tried to extract tar.gz package and got this error:

gzip: stdin: not in gzip format
tar: Child returned status 1
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

Not sure if this is related though.

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The install scripts are for plasma 5, if you use kpackagetool6 -t Plasma/Applet -u package (replace -u with -i if no old version exists) it should work.

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also the zoom is in hover-zoom-wip branch so you will need to clone/checkout that one

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@luisbocanegra Oh, yeah I definitely downloaded the wrong branch lol. Okay, will try again.

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@luisbocanegra Okay, tried new branch and got this error:

file:///home/user/.local/share/plasma/plasmoids/alexankitty.fancytasks/contents/ui/main.qml:38:5: Type Task unavailable

file:///home/user/.local/share/plasma/plasmoids/alexankitty.fancytasks/contents/ui/Task.qml:878:13: Property value set multiple times

file:///home/user/.local/share/plasma/plasmoids/alexankitty.fancytasks/contents/ui/Task.qml:879:13: Property value set multiple times

Any ideas? I’ll try again later. I am running Arch, so maybe the newer packages is messing something up not sure (I know literally nothing about writing applets).

Edit: I noticed lts not supported message on github page. Unsure if this is a reference to the kernel used as I do use an lts kernel. I guess I should just wait until it’s done and then build the aur package?

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I think you are still trying to install the plasma6 branch, I think there was a bad commit there that I just reverted. I have no errors installing from either

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@luisbocanegra
Well, I tried again and failed again. I sucessfully built it and installed it with your scripts, but even after logging out and back in it did not show up. For now, I will just install the aur version, then when that part gets merged I can just update to the new one. Until then, I’ll just look forward to the feature. Thanks for your work on this project! :slight_smile:

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As a temp solution you can use crystal dock. I would say it’s not as nice if you use sleep/hibernate. But it gets the job done and has a few themes to fit your desktop. Crystal Dock - pling.com