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Plugins wish list
Here you can post your feature requests for the panel plugins. There is no guarantee that any of them will actually be implemented. Please keep the Xfce philosophy in mind and add a small explanation why this feature would be useful or a description of the problem it solves.
Wishes that are striked through are implemented or rejected by the developer.
This list is meant to act as a working list for future additions, not to reopen discussion on features and things that are history.
Global ideas
Merge the 'monitor' plugins so you have one single plugin which can use modules to show various system information (implement
MenuMeters).
A new plugin should be created aside existing plugins, so users can still depend on simple plugins that do one thing or install the new plugin that does everything. – mike
Alex has started to work on this (May 2012)
Merge the iconbox and tasklist plugin. – fixed in 4.8
Put Dictionary plugin (like gnome dictionary). And if it's possible possibility of traduction of single words.
Hide clipman when it's empty, and place it in the system tray if it's possible.
Possibility to swap position of “Lock Screen” and “Quit” buttons in System Actions. – fixed in 4.8
Allow plugins to be run in the notification area, so they can be used with other panels, like tint2. (e.g. plugins: clipman & notes)
xfce4-weather-plugin and xfce4-datetime-plugin (possibly others) only display in black font. When panel color is a dark color or transparent with a dark wallpaper the font is unreadable. Request to either have a global font color for all panel plugins or individual color settings for panel items. I'd say a global panel font color setting would be ideal.
Include a “Show label instead of icon” option in the properties dialog, like the Launcher plugin has, so people can call it “Places” to mimick the look and feel of Gnome 2.
Merge functionalities from Places Plugin: removable media, recent files, and maybe search (search current directory?). It would make it the perfect plugin!
Launcher
Set launcher properties with DBus. This way you can change the icon with a monitoring script.
Not very user friendly to implement, when you have multiple launchers.
Fixed in 4.8, where each launcher item has a desktop file that is monitored.
Multiple launcher. This options will show all the items in 1 button (so multiple icons in 1 button) and will launcher them all when the button is pressed.
Having appfinder merged/imbedded in. – fixed in 4.8
When multiplelauncher icon doesnt launch an application itself, long click or arrow click could be replaced by simple click on icon ( if first app link to no command then no arrow for the following app).
A tick to toggle the display of the arrow for “Multiple Launcher”
Ability to slide items from the panel such as the trash, clipman,… to the multiple-single launcher.
Add an “Open maximized” checkbox to launch the application in maximized state. Most applications can at best just save their position+size to fill the entire screen, but don't save their last state.
Taskbar
Add sorting order option “manually” to window buttons to be able to sort buttons also by drag&drop like before 4.8 !
Option to only show windows from current screen (for multihead systems).
Show workspace name in the tooltip when showing windows from multiple workspaces.
More flexible way of showing the button.
Rotate the buttons 90 degrees when the taskbar orientation is vertical.
Show buttons above each other when the taskbar is aligned horizontal and in a corner. Including grouping by task. Like BeOS does.
Allow fixed (constant) height of buttons when taskbar orientation is vertical and panel length is set to “full length”.
Option to control ordering of buttons, at least make buttons
well-ordered.
Options when a task should be visible in the taskbar.
Unhide the panel when a task becomes urgent in the taskbar.
Quickly close a task with (for example) a middle mouse click.
Option to enable hide/unhide or shade/unshade with the scroll wheel.
particularly with Logitech's freewheeling scroll, shade happens unintentionally A LOT!!
Option to enable/disable icons in taskbar
Option to toggle dimming of inactive icons
Forum
When they esten grouped several applications, to have of general menu system to unhide, hide, etc. Very util with applications like Gimp.
Switching to the task on the left or on the right from the current one, and selecting first, second, …, tenth item in a taskbar (via keyboard - would need a new keyboard-event, like switching workspaces? Or maybe as a command, or a parameter to xftaskbar4 or sth?) (maybe also to up and to down if tasks span over more than one row)
Changing order of items in a taskbar by moving current task left or right (or up or down) in the list (again, new keyboard-event or a command?) (hmm… just released that a task order is a vague thing…)
Change icon size according to panel size. instead of a static 16×16 icon.
Notification Area
Icon Box
Show the workspace number in the button.
Option to show a task on this native workspace or on the current workspace (when showing tasks from multiple workspaces).
Use middle click button to close a window like a web tab and maybe add an optional close button on the current task.
Mouse Wheel on the icon box to cycle through windows (= Alt-Tab)
Allow a window to be brought to the foreground by dragging a text selection, link, image, or file to the target window's icon in the iconbox, making it possible to easily copy selections, links, images, or files by drag'n'drop from a maximized window to another (the same way the tasklist does).
Option to group together window icons from the same application, perhaps with a sub-option to always/never collapse multiple windows for the same app into a single icon with a popup window list on rightclick or click-hold.
Option to reverse the order in which icons are added to the iconbox (top-to-bottom vs. bottom-to-top, left-to-right vs. right-to-left).
Merge launcher with icon box, allowing programs to be launched, minimized, and focused from a single icon in the icon box.
Add the option to disable alpha of icons representing minimized windows.
Enable compiz fusion minimize effects… although i don't know if its an xfce issue or compiz fusion one.
Enable compiz fusion window previews. Since two windows from the same application have the same icon, this can tell them apart
Allow to set the focus to a window in a nonactive workspace with a right mouse click on the symbolized window in the pager while staying on the active workspace (like the pager of fvwm2).
Split workspace on multihead-systems so workspaces can be changed on each display individually.
simple workspace identification (for example: editable letters, numbers or images in background/foreground or semi-transparent), which remains always visible. They are useful to remember keyboard short-cuts for each workspace or to separate applications which have no unique icon themselves)
Allow to show only the name of the current workspace (like in fluxbox) so it doesn't take too much space if you have like 10 workspaces.
Add an option to have the pager not wrap when changing workspaces with CTRL+ALT+arrow so I can quickly get to any workspace without knowing my current workspace. E.g. I have a 3×3 grid of workspaces and I like to be able to do two CTRL+ALT+left and then two CTRL+ALT+up to know I am in the upper-left workspace without regard to where I started.
Mail Watcher
Tooltip that shows the number of new and total messages in the box (like wmbiff).
IMAP and SSL (for IMAP and POP3) support.
Also support for ssh port forwarding would be nice. –kelnos
Show Sender and Subject of new emails in the tooltip
Allow fast email deletion (SPAM)
Allow activation/deactivation of accounts (instead of having to delete and create them new)
Have an item in the context menu to clear the error log. No need to look into the log when you know exactly why some updates failed (e.g. pulled network cable). Now that's 6 clicks! With context menu item you'd only have 2 (context open and “clear log”)
Hide icon when there are no new messages; show icon only when there are new messages. Could function similar to notifications of new updates. When there aren't new messages, the icon serves no purpose.
Volume control
Alternative way of setting the volume level. Current implementation isn't very user friendly when the panel size is small. A slider alternative like Gnome could be a solution.
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A new mixer will be shipped with Xfce 4.6:
Screenshot – Jannis
Can add alternative channels like a KDE`s mixer plugin
Can remove icon, just to show only bar to change volume
Would be nice if it worked better with vertical panels – e.g. if the bar was horizontal, so it matched all the other applets like system load etc. Currently it doesn't look very nice with the massive icon and vertical bar.
An global Equalizer would be great
Single-click mute would be fabulous, or even a fast double-click.
Free Space Checker
Label tick to select the available space number as label, the hover label is removed in this case and if any label is set the mount point is not stated in the dialog
Clicking the icon opens the disk at the specified mountpoint (double use) OR displays the space left label
Xfapplet
Context menu to add, edit, remove menu items.
Drag and drop between menu, panels, and Thunar.
xfce4-toggle-applicationsmenu script that could be mapped to a keyboard key to popup/hide the menu. Currently, xfce4-popup-applicationsmenu can be mapped to a key, but the menu needs to be closed using Esc key. Same wish applies to all xfce4-popup-*.
Keyboard layout chooser
The current keyboard layout chooser allows you to select a compose key, but not a third level chooser (the xkb options beginning “lv3:*” ) which is required for keyboards that have more than one shift state. Setting it using setxkbmap is similar to the other options. The layout switchers in both KDE and GNOME support graphical interfaces to choose the third level key.\
Swap caps and ctrl. (or caps to extra ctrl (no swap). or caps to extra esc.)
New Plugins
netgraph – Union between cpugraph and netload (or simply combine system resource monitors into one plugin, like
MenuMeters).
Free Space monitor – Monitor showing a graphical representation of free space on mounted file systems. Also, the ability to mount & unmount file systems listed at /etc/fstab would be useful. Think of a small popup list of file systems with size info that can be mounted/unmounted by clicking on them.
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Here is a quick hack to get you started.
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PDF printer (print to
PDF file) plugin
upkeep or fork of
Xfce4 Panel Menu plugin. At the least, introduce a search box, as included with Ubuntu-System-Panel. I'm tired of trying to figure out whether the application I'm wanting is located under 'accessories' or 'system'.
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Starting Xfce 4.6 it is possible to use the command line tool xfconf-query to toggle the embedded compositor on/off, just like xfconf-query -c xfwm4 -p /general/compositing -s [false|true]. You can write a little shell script that will first read the value (don't pass the -s option) to toggle it. You can than add a launcher to call that script.
An item for the panel to indicate Caps Lock and Num Lock status. LXDE has one and it is very helpful on laptops and USB keyboards that no longer have the leds.
If orage could have synchronization with google calendar it would be great
Manage to port the
GNOME Window Applet to Xfce in order to get the window buttons into the panel and removing the title bar with maximus apps.