Resizing task manager icons?

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1

I have a relatively wide (80px) taskbar on the left of my screen. My issue is that the icons scale with the width and are thus way too large. I’ve fixed this in the past by editing layoutmetrics.js in /usr/share/plasma/plasmoids/org.kde.plasma.taskmanager/, but that directory is no longer there as of Plasma 6.6.

I’ve tried

  • A thinner taskbar. It makes the icons smaller but ruins the system tray and calendar.
  • Icons-and-Text Task Manager. The icon sizes are better but I don’t like the text.
  • Fancy Tasks NG. I can change the icon sizes but the buttons stay the same size so it doesn’t help.
  • Looked for other task managers but didn’t find any.

Any other ideas? Is there some way to use Icons-and-Text Task Manager without the text? Or some way to bring back /usr/share/plasma/plasmoids/org.kde.plasma.taskmanager/ or some other file I can edit to change the icon size?

2

If you use the multi-column view with 2 columns, you should get half-width icons (which of course are half-height, therefore 1/4 the area).

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3

Thanks for the suggestion, but I’d prefer to keep the tasks in one column.

4

i use a vertical panel that is only 36px wide and i fit the clock in with a hack that moves the AM/PM to a new line

the system tray being vertical does not bother me.

Screenshot_20260309_064055

5

I suppose I could try that but I’m not a fan of how much vertical space it would take along with the single-column systray. Thanks anyway.

6

you don’t have to go down to 36px, i’m just demonstrating how the digital clock warps it’s display (the date part anyway) when it’s constrained on the sides, so you can play with font size to get a readable clock and still have a panel narrow enough so that the task bar icons are not unwieldy… something between 80px and 36px.

it’s not awful at 60px and my system tray is two columns, so it doesn’t take up as much vertical space.

Screenshot_20260309_141909
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7

Then don’t add so many that they spill into the extra column…?

8

I’m just going to eat my words here before someone else gets on my case. I completely misinterpreted pg-tips’ solution, carry on.

1 Like
9

I’m not a huge fan but I’d settle for this if there’s no other way. Does the hack also work with 24-hour time with seconds? Would you mind sharing it?

10

this hack only inserts a \n character between the time format and the AM/PM option if that is how you have your region time display set up.

i’ve not tried it with any other region settings and it had no effect on the 24hr option in the digital clock settings since the AM/PM part is omitted by the .qml.

if you wanted to hack the result function used on line 621 that would be a totally different hack… you would need to trace that back to where result determined and see if such an opportunity exists there.

there is a split clock 3rd party clock that does this for you already if you want to look at that.

from my notes:

# to make changes to the digital clock edit .qml file
/usr/share/plasma/plasmoids/org.kde.plasma.digitalclock/contents/ui/DigitalClock.qml

# line 608
# to change AM/PM to appear as am/pm look for the variable declaration
    var amPm = "AP";
# change the quoted text to lower case
    var amPm = "ap";  // use lower case for am/pm display in 12hr clock

# line 621
# to move 12hr clock AM/PM display to a new line look for the if statement with
    result += " " + amPm;
# insert an escaped new line character into the string
    result += "\n" + amPm;  // puts AM/PM display on new line for vertical panels

# line 501
# to change the clock color look for
    id: timeLabel
# add a line under it to define the desired color (line 501)
    color: "#69ffff"  // changes color of the time display

# line 537
# to change the date color look for
    id: dateLabel
# add a line under it to define the desired color
    color: "#cdffff"  // changes color of the date display

# to copy the settings for the clock plasmoid manually use
# kpackagetool5 --install /usr/share/plasma/plasmoids/org.kde.plasma.digitalclock/
solution depreciated