El Centro de Control de KDE
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# 5.38. Panel

## 5.38.1. Introduction

The KDE panel (often referred to as kicker) is the bar that you'll usually find at the bottom of the screen when you start up KDE for the first time. The panel gives you quick access to applications and makes it easier for you to organize your desktop. Using the KDE panel you can for example

- launch applications using the K menu or the application buttons

- switch desktops using the panel's pager applet

- switch active windows, and minimize or maximize them

- browse directory using the browser menu functionality

- access panel applets that extend the panel's functionality, offering for example mixers, clocks or a system monitor

## 5.38.2. General

In the General tab you can configure some basic functionality of the KDE panel (i.e. functionality you'd find in other panel applications as well; later we'll come to the more interesting features).

### 5.38.2.1. Location and Size

In the Location frame you can choose which screen border the panel should be attached to. Please note that usually the available space is used more efficiently if the panel is aligned horizontally, i.e. attached to the top or bottom screen border. If you want to play around with different settings you can change the panel's position even easier by dragging the panel from one border to the other.

The panel's size can be tiny, normal or large. Depending on which applets you use you may find that some applets work better at different panel sizes.

### 5.38.2.2. Hide Buttons and Auto Hide

Depending on your screen resolution you may find that the panel takes away too much of your precious screen real estate. The KDE panel offers two ways of saving screen space: you can either use hide buttons to manually hide the panel when you don't need it or you can configure the panel to automatically hide when it's not needed.

When the panel's hide buttons are enabled you'll see buttons on either side of the panel, with arrows showing to the screen borders. If you click on one of these buttons, the panel will slide away to the desired direction. After that, you'll only see a remaining show button that will make the panel show again. Check the Enabled option to enable this feature. If Highlight on mouse over option is enabled, the hide buttons will be highlighted when the mouse cursor is moved over them. Using the Size slider you can change the width of the buttons.

When the auto hide feature is enabled, the panel will hide when the mouse cursor has not been moved over it for a configurable amount of time. If you move the mouse to the panel's screen border it will show up again. Check the Enabled option in the Auto Hide frame to enable this feature. Using the Delay in seconds slider you can configure the amount of time the panel will wait before it hides.

## 5.38.3. Look & Feel

Using the Look & Feel tab you can configure some options that will not alter the panel's functionality but its overall appearance.

Using the Hide Animation (for the hide buttons) and Auto Hide Animation (for the auto hide functionality) options you can configure whether the panel will softly slide away or just disappear. You can enable or disable both animations using the Enabled options and you can change the speed of the animation using the Speed sliders.

A Background Theme is a picture that will be used to draw the panel's background, just like you can use a picture for the desktop background. Check the Use background theme option to enable this feature. You can specify an image file in the line edit box below or choose one by clicking on the Browse button. You'll see a preview of the selected picture on the right.

The Fade out applet handles option will hide the small handles used to move panel applets. The handles will only show when the mouse cursor is moved over them.

## 5.38.4. Menus

In the Menus tab you can configure the panel menu's behavior. This affects the K menu you will often use to launch applications, the browser menus you can use to access directory and other menus like the recent documents menu.

The menu cache is a feature that can make the panel's menus appear faster on screen: instead of reading the menu information from disk every time you access a menu, the panel will remember menu entries after accessing the menus for the first time. However, depending on the amount of memory available to your system, you might want this cache to be cleared after some time. Check the Clear menu cache option if you want the cache to be cleared after some time. You can configure the amount of time after which the cache will be cleared using the slider below.

In the Browser Menus frame you can configure whether the panel's browser menus will show hidden files or not (hidden files on unix systems are those whose filenames begin with a dot) as well as how many files at most will be shown in a browser menu. The latter option may be especially useful if you have a rather small screen resolution, as then the browser menus will quickly fill up your screen when you browse directories containing many files.

The K menu frame offers you some options to configure the K menu's functionality. Merge different menu locations will show all applications in the same directories, regardless of where the corresponding configuration files are stored: for example, enabling this option will show system wide applications in your Applications menu as well as you own ones. If you'd disable this option, there would be one applications menu for the whole system and one in a submenu containing only your personal entries.

The Show bookmarks submenu and Show recent documents submenu option will enable submenus showing your konqueror bookmarks and the last documents you've opened using KDE applications respectivly.

The Show quick browser submenu option will enable a browser menu.

## 5.38.5. Buttons

The KDE panel supports so-called "tiled buttons". This means that the buttons shown on the panel will be drawn using configurable images. To enable button tiling, check the Enable background tiles option in the Buttons tab. Then you can configure tiles for certain kinds of buttons.

For every kind of panel button there's a frame offering an Enabled option to enable or disable tiled images. If tiles are enabled for this kind of button, you can choose a tile in the combo box below and the box on the right will show a preview of this tile.

## 5.38.6. Applets

Applets are small plugins that extend the pager's functionality. KDE comes with some applets but they may be provided by third parties as well. Panel applets can be started using two different ways: internal or externally. While 'internal' is the preferred way to load applets, this can raise stability or security problems when you are using poorly programmed third-party applets. To address these problems, applets can be marked 'trusted'. You might want to configure the panel to treat trusted applets different from untrusted ones. Your options are:

- Load only trusted applets internal: All applets but the ones marked 'trusted' will be loaded using an external wrapper application.

- Load startup config applets internal: The applets shown on KDE startup will be loaded internally, others will be loaded using an external wrapper application.

- Load all applets internal: will load all applets internally, regardless of whether they're trusted or not.

For stability and security reasons, we recommend using one of the first two options and that you mark only those applets as 'trusted' that come with the KDE base packages.

To mark applets 'trusted' or 'untrusted' you can move them from one of the shown listboxes to the other. Just try selecting an applet in the list of trusted applets and click the >> button. This will move the selected applet to the other list, while clicking the << button will move the selected applet of the list of available applets to the list of trusted ones.

## 5.38.7. Section Author

This section written by: Jost Schenck `<jost@schenck.de>`

Minor update by Mike McBride `<mpmcbride7@yahoo.com>`

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