After years of my desktop environment (kde) being configured the same way, I tried enabling auto-hiding in my panel and I quite like the extra screen estate.
Now, the only reasons why I have a panel in the first place are the clock and the system tray (I don’t use the start applications menu and I don’t care for the task manager) so I’ve started wondering if I could completely dispose of the panel.
Do you know of any launcher (I use krunner but switching to something else is fine) that satisfies (or can be configured to satisfy) the following?
- shows the current date/time
- integrates a system tray
- launches applications
- does math, unit conversion and currency conversion
Couldn’t you configure the existing panel to do what you want? Add and remove widgets and resize it and you should have what you need.
As far as I’m aware, no launcher (in the style of KRunner) exists which has all those features.
With some effort, you could implement a lot of this functionality using a “generic” launcher (like rofi, for example), but integrating a system tray will be close to impossible (unless you’re willing to write a program which acts as a system tray and provides those launchers with enough information to display a useful representation of the tray, could be cool).
You can create a panel in edit mode and put whatever you need (clock, system tray, application menu) on it. Set size to fit content and make windows go below which results in a tiny floating panel for example.
AFAIK there is no krunner widget I can add to a panel… but regardless: can I have the panel show/hide via some keyboard shortcut?
(If they can’t be together, I could live with alt+space => toggle krunner and, for example, alt+shift+space => toggle panel)
I’m not sure if you can show/hide like that, but as a workaround you can toggle auto-hiding with a qdbus command, and set a keyboard shortcut to run that.
GNOME
Edit: Sorry, I may have misunderstood the question as I’m not entirely sure what a launcher is in the context of Linux, but I’ve been using GNOME as my desktop environment for years and it does everything asked for here.
IIRC krunner works as a commandline tool, so maybe you could do what you want with something like yakuake, or even make a wrapper for krunner with those additional options.
It seems like something I could use as well. I’ll note it down to take a look later.
