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.

• 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.
  • This should be optional (e.g. checkbox in the clipman plugin)
    • The plugin can be run in the notification area, thus it can be quit/started more easily, or auto-hidden with the notification applet. ⇒ The plugin doesn't come with an autohide feature in the end.
• 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.
  • That's a good idea! But, for the time being, you can have something like that in your gtk theme file:

  style "theme-panel"
  {
      fg[NORMAL] = "#f5f5f5"
  }
  widget "*Xfce*Panel*" style "theme-panel"

• 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!
• modify filtering function to implement -filter to remove from the menu list, ex i dont want to display all subdirs of the base dir so having a filter like -somedirname would be useful

• 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.
    • Looking for something like this: http://rox.sourceforge.net/Manual/Manual/Manual.html#soap
  • 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”
  • Fixed in 4.6 with the “arrow button position” combobox.
• Ability to slide items from the panel such as the trash, clipman,… to the multiple-single launcher.
  • Not something for the launcher, but a plugin-container plugin.
• 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.
  • Not something the panel can control.
• Enable the Launcher to display Icon AND Text
• Ability to set custom keyboard shortcuts for each item in a multi launcher by e. g. setting its label to “&Webbrowser” (then w is the shortcut)
• Make adding the first program to a launcher more user friendly. Currently clicking a new Launcher does nothing; it instead automatically open the application picker dialog. Editing existing Launchers should not be changed.

• 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).
  • This works already that way. Probably depends on the display manager? (GDM in my case) The option would be more like display Tasks from all screens then.
• Show workspace name in the tooltip when showing windows from multiple workspaces.
  • Sort tasks by workspace.
• 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.
  • Show only (or no) minimized tasks.
• Unhide the panel when a task becomes urgent in the taskbar.
• Quickly close a task with (for example) a middle mouse click. Option for close Buttons on every Task? (most Laptop touchpads don’t have a middle button, and emulation dosn’t work well either) Implemented: right click, panel, panel preferences, items, window buttons, settings (cog icon), behaviour, middle click action, close window. I don't know how you missed it! ;)
• Option to middle click / mousewheel shutdown or restart, i.e. add settings option in Action Buttons for which action to assign to middle click. Request for shutdown as default.
• Option to enable hide/unhide or shade/unshade with the scroll wheel.
  1. particularly with Logitech's freewheeling scroll, shade happens unintentionally A LOT!! ( - also happens when using a laptops scroll area on touchpad!)
• 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.
• Add an option to display inactive and/or minimized windows as icon only, while showing the label only for active and/or normal/maximized windows. If it were possible, to make the Label apear instantly on hovering, it would be a nice expierience to watch them popping up and colapsing again, one by one, and you won’t have to wait for tooltip showing up to get the windows titleinfo - - Usefull for small screens and/or portrait view, especially on tablets & convertibles
• Filtering: Show (only) windows from workspace [#] This would allow multiple panels/taskbars to correspond to the side of the screen they are on and another workspace is relative to, so you always know where your other windows are.

• Adapt icon size to the container panel size.
  • Not possible - the notification area has no idea what's in the notification icons, and there's no (reasonable) way to find out. –kelnos
    • A bit more fixed in trunk, the icon (socket window) is allocated to the available space. That's all we can do; the external application will then set an appropriate icon, whether this fills the entire space (audacious) or a sharp icon (GtkStatusIcon) is something we cannot control. –nick

• Add row/col option for icons in “Notification Area” , for vertical panel.
  • Trunk has an option to set the number of rows. Work for both horizontal and vertical panels. –nick
    • Not any more, this option has gone.

• Notify when new removable device is plugged/unplugged,network connected/disconnected, cable is plugged/unplugged.
  • Not a systray issue, should be done my a daemon that shows a status icon. For devices there already is xfce4-volstatus-icon. –nick

• Make other panel-plugins dockable like volume-manager or clock(would be great to have one frame around all)
• Only show icons for applications on the current workspace.
• Pleeeeeeeease bring back the rows option that was definitely in 4.6.1. In 4.10 I cannot make icons small AND use the all the space available in the notif area: I have a 22 pixel bar but icons can only go down to 12 pixels… not that with a 24 pixel bar (or any size) the rows come back (even 24px is far too big - vertical space is at a premium since the fashion and cheapness/profitability of wide-screens, so even 2px more is massively wasteful).
• Specified application order in systray/notification area (like in indicator-plugin or statusnotifier not alphabetical but predefined ) (already added in 4.13)

• 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).
  • wouldn't this conflict with context-menues? Maybe use middle-click for this instead?
• 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.
  • Oops, I just found the option for this in window manager tweaks. Perhaps add the options to the pager config dialog?

• Tooltip that shows the number of new and total messages in the box (like wmbiff).
  • Why? The entire purpose of the plugin is to notify you of new mail. It's not a generic mailbox-info applet, and I have no intention of turning it into one. –kelnos
• IMAP and SSL (for IMAP and POP3) support.
  • This has always been supported. You need to compile with gnutls support.
• Also support for ssh port forwarding would be nice. –kelnos
  • How does this work? –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.

• 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.
  • A new plugin has been written and will be released with Xfce 4.6. At the moment it is for mouse wheel only but it also lets you click to start the real (and NEW) mixer. A version with a slider may follow. – Jannis
  • If anyone is impatient to get the slider back, feel free to compile: http://goodies.xfce.org/projects/panel-plugins/xfce4-generic-slider
• The current volume control is not very nice, is it possible to make GUI more nice and user friendly? Please see this image: http://www.volny.cz/sisman/xfce4-mixer-1.png
  • 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.
• Scrolling the mouse wheel should change the volume when the control is clicked (and the blue volume bar is visible)
• Right-click menu could have a quick option for toggling the default audio device. This is useful for switching between speakers & headphones
• Ability to add multiple audio mixer controls to the panel, to quickly control volumes for multiple audio devices

For gods sake, please apply the micro patch from this almost 2 year old bug report

• 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

• ship with static gnome libarys

• Ability to change the menu-icon-size (16x16px icons looks so ugly) – fixed in 4.8 with the panel-applications-menu style property.
  • or display as default in 22 or 24px
• 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-*.
  • Bug 10451

• 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.)

Add a display option “Show tasks overview”

• When not checked, the names of available workspaces will be visible (as currently)
• When checked:
  • This displays the icons of all Apps currently opened in the workspaces in a miniature view.
  • If no app, show an empty workspace in a miniature view.

Workspace switcher plugin

• netgraph – Union between cpugraph and netload (or simply combine system resource monitors into one plugin, like MenuMeters).
  • Alex has started working on this (May 2012).

• 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.
  • The mount plugin can do parts of this request.
  • There is the free space checker plugin now.

• wmplugin – compatibility layer for Window Maker Dockapps to be added to the panel.
  • Danny has started working on this.
  • Andre has started too. (Plugin will be named xfce4-wmdock-plugin)
    • My first version of the plugin is done. You can find it here.

• Plugin for simulating (for example) media buttons.
  • Do you mean MPRIS client as panel plugin? Because it sounds great and better than Ubuntu sound menu.

• Plugin simulating old-style panel handlers
  • has been requested in bz #3360, is now available in separator plugin

• None of the following links work. Could someone provide new, working links, as well as a short description?
  • Xfce version of this
    • Here is a quick hack to get you started.
    • Nowadays it is better to follow the RandR protocol

• Bluetooth plugin

• Calculator plugin
  • Try at http://e01.homelinux.net/xfce4-calc-plugin/
  • Or http://personal.inet.fi/private/erikedelmann/xfce4-calculator-plugin.html

• Direcoty lister in menues, starting from '/', similar to 'Places'
  • Xfce Panel 4.7 comes with a directory menu plugin

• PDF printer (print to PDF file) plugin
  • Cups already allows this

• PickerColor plugin, just for take a color on screen with rgb, html and decimal values
  • Create a launcher for gcolor2.

• Network plugin like as Knemo.

• 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'.

• composite switch plugin like http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php/Toggle-Compositing?content=78299
  • 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.

• Fast xorg config-plugin for environment variables __GL_FSAA_MODE etc.(like the nvidia/ati config plugins on windoze)

• 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

• Force-quit application plugin, like the one featured in GNOME 2.x.

• 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.
  • The new xfce4-windowck-plugin have implemented this feature.

• Add a plugin that shows recent notifications. Like Cinnamon and Gnome desktops.

• A user-customizable slider toggle. Made so it runs a command when turned on, and another when turned off. This would be extremely useful for developers using VMs or containers. And for web developers or service providers with loads of projects. To enable and disable virtual hosts. Even for sysadmins who want to stop/start/enable/disable things like tasks/daemons/services. enabling/disabling ssh tunnels/vpn connections/firewall exceptions. The possibilities are endless. stdout/stderr could optionally be shown as notifications.