Plasma secrets

Dedoimedo has a nice little hack for us Plasma users.

https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/plasma-system-area-icon-spacing.html

I now have the same spacing as the Task Manager, looks more uniform now.

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Interesting, for me, the condensed spacing looks a lot better. My tray and task manager are pretty far apart and are styled very differently so minor spacing differences aren’t really noticeable.

Maybe my eyes are further apart than yours :flushed: anyhoo that’s the beauty of it all, we can change things to our liking. :sunglasses:

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No, padding really makes a difference. This applies to all icons on the panel. It’s one of the most overlooked design elements: white space. I had to do a similar tweak to my XFCE. Now my eyes can gently hover over the beauty of well separated icons. :smiley:

Care to point to a similar source for the XFCE version? :grin: I feel a bit space challenged here, and haven’t learned all the hiding places of the settings yet… or do you just create an entry in the gtk css as I use for Thunar spacing?

It’s the same for XFCE: ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css
This is what I use:

window.xfce4-panel widget > button#whiskermenu-button image,
window.xfce4-panel widget > button#pulseaudio-button > image, 
window.xfce4-panel widget > button#showdesktop-button > image, 
window.xfce4-panel widget > box > button > image{
   -gtk-icon-transform: scale(0.6);
}
window.xfce4-panel widget > button#whiskermenu-button:hover,
window.xfce4-panel widget.tasklist button:hover,
window.xfce4-panel widget > button#pulseaudio-button:hover, 
window.xfce4-panel widget > box > button:hover{
   background-color: rgba(255,255,255,0.13);
  /* box-shadow: 0 -2px rgba(46,179,152, 0.5) inset;   */
}

window#whiskermenu-window treeview>* {
  padding:0.2em 0.16em;
}

The trick here is to use a bit bigger icons in panel settings so that they even out with the decreased scaling applied by the CSS above. It’s the only solution i found. any padding added in that css is ignored. I tried margin and also padding on the parent container. But hey, it works :smiley:

capture-200509-234128

I am certainly gong to try it, but I am going in with doubts of its usefulness… That bit of trickery will have trouble when I already have the icons at maximum! Not to mention that the notification area is the more difficult problem - most of those are too small AND too close. I’ll let you know if my fears are justified…

Here’s the current look (split to keep sizes reasonable). Thank for the effort - regardless of outcome!
panel-left
panel-right

the notification area has its own icon size settings. Unfortunately i wasn’t able to style that. it doesn’t belong to the theme somehow.

I think the same, I don’t see a noticeable difference with my original bar in the spaces between the icons.

did you restart xfce? xfce4-panel -r && xfwm4 --replace
Just as a note, not sure about this but new EndeavorOS installs might already have that css i gave a few posts back already in place.

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