Taskbar left/right regression

Help
1

Hello,

[Intro]
I am using KDE plasma since several years now, both at home and professionally. I have a high-resolution screen and spend most of my time on software development, meaning, having few more lines of code visible at the same time is importante to me (vertical space is good, horizontal is useless).
For this reason, I am used to put the taskbar left of my screen. I also like having a wide taskbar where I can easily see many open applications open, and their title (so I can quickly and easily switch between 5-6 konsole):

Here is a screenshot of my current KDE plasma 5.20.5 (200x2160 px)

image
image214×2160 99.3 KB

As you can see, the digital clock and date are already way to big.

[Problematic]
In the latest version of Debian (12) with KDE plasma 5.27.5, several of the elements (Widgets) do not adapt as before to this configuration:

The default application launcher now shows a huge 200x200 pixels KDE button, which is way too big:

(IMAGE2 removed, I am limited to one image)

And still the clock/date have a font of almost 40px, which is also way too big (14-16 should be good):

(IMAGE3 removed, I am limited to one image)

This is WAY TOO BIG. I increase the width of the task-bar to see the text, not to have a 200x200 pixels application launcher button or a 200x100 pixel clock/date.

Note: my screen is 4K, but not HDPI, its actually a standard ~96dpi screen.

I also miss the configuration in the task manager settings to specify the size of application icons which was present in version 5.20.

(IMAGE4 removed, I am limited to one image)

[Need help]

I wonder if there is now a way to have this taskbar usable in my configuration:

  • How to make the application launcher button 30x30 px
  • How to make the digital clock and date font smaller
  • How to make the Task Manager icons (consequently the rows) smaller (25px or so).

Adrian

2

IMAGE2 about the application launcher button too big:
image

3

IMAGE3 about the digital clock and date:
image

4

IMAGE4 about task manager settings for icon size:

image
image808×409 36.4 KB

5

on the clock you can set it to show the AM/PM which it looks like you tried and that will squash the font size a bit, but the date and time are under separate control and each will size according to the width of the panel.

for my case i wanted a narrow vertical panel but wanted the clock (time) text to be large enough to read (opposite of your problem) so i went searching for a tall narrow font at fontspace.org and set my clock to use Bernound

perhaps you could find a flat wide font that would size to your liking.

for the date you can use the custom format to add spaces which will cause the font to shrink or it will break onto a new line.

6

for the icon it will resize whatever image you have selected (right click, configure, click on the icon to change it).

if you change it an image with more blank padding then it will appear smaller because it is resizing a larger image.

you can use an image editor create a copy of the logo icon with more padding to get the size you want.