<sect1 id="panel">
<sect1info>

<authorgroup>
<author>
<firstname>Mike</firstname>
<surname>McBride</surname>
</author>
<author>
<firstname>Jost</firstname>
<surname>Schenck</surname>
</author>
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</authorgroup>

<date>2001-07-22</date>
<releaseinfo>2.20.00</releaseinfo>

<keywordset>
<keyword>KDE</keyword>
<keyword>KControl</keyword>
<keyword>panel</keyword>
</keywordset>
</sect1info>

<title>Panel</title>

<sect2 id="panel-intro">
<title>Introduction</title>
<para>
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. <!-- FIXME: reference to the kicker manual --> 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
</para>

<itemizedlist>
<listitem><para>launch applications using the <guimenu>K</guimenu> menu or
the application buttons</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>switch desktops using the panel's pager applet</para>
</listitem>
<listitem><para>switch active windows, and minimize or maximize them</para>
</listitem>
<listitem><para>browse directory using the browser menu functionality
</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>access panel applets that extend the panel's functionality,
offering for example mixers, clocks or a system monitor</para> </listitem>
</itemizedlist>

</sect2>

<sect2 id="panel-position">
<title>Position</title>

<para>In the <guilabel>Position</guilabel> tab you can configure some
basic functionality of the &kde; panel (&ie; functionality you'd find in
other panel applications as well; later we'll come to the more
interesting features).</para>

<para>In the <guilabel>Panel Location</guilabel> 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, &ie; 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.</para>

<para>The panel's size can be tiny, small, medium or large. Depending on
which applets you use you may find that some applets work better at
different panel sizes.</para>

<para>Depending on your screen resolution you may find that the panel
takes away too much of your precious screen real estate. To save screen
space, the panel offers an auto hide feature. When this 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 <guilabel>Enable
automatic hide</guilabel> option in the <guilabel>Automatic
Hide</guilabel> frame to enable this feature. Using the <guilabel>Delay
in seconds</guilabel> slider you can configure the amount of time the
panel will wait before it hides.</para>

<para>You can also set the panel to be less than the desktop height or
width.  Use the slider, or set a percentage directly in the
spinbox.</para>

<para>As you might imagine, this will result in &kicker; sometimes
having more entries than it can fit into the space you have allowed it.
In this case, you will find your panel has scrollbuttons on the end, and
you need to scroll the panel to see all of it.</para>

<para>The <guilabel>Expand to fit required size</guilabel> checkbox will
enable &kicker; to always take enough space to display all it's icons,
even if this is more than the percentage you have set to be used.</para>

<para>Note that if you do this, you then can still set a smaller
percentage than the amount of space &kicker; requires to show all the
currently visible items, but it will be ignored.  If you want to make
&kicker; smaller, you should reduce it's size above in the
<guilabel>Panel Size</guilabel> section.</para>

<para><guilabel>Preferred terminal application</guilabel> is the default
terminal program to be used by the QuickBrowser when you select
<guilabel>Open in Terminal</guilabel>.  It's very likely you don't need
to change this option.</para>

</sect2>

<sect2 id="panel-hiding">
<title>Hiding</title>

<para>When the panel's hide buttons are enabled you'll see a button on
the right hand side of the panel (by default), with an arrow pointing to
the screen border. If you click on this button, the panel will slide
away in that direction.  After that, you'll see just a show button in
that corner, which will make the panel show again.</para>

<para>The default setting is to have only <guilabel>Enable right/bottom
hide button</guilabel> checked.  You can check the other box to
<guilabel>Enable left/top hide button</guilabel>.  You can have both
hide buttons enabled at once, or you can turn both of them off.</para>

<para>Using the <guilabel>Manual Hide Animation</guilabel> (for the hide
buttons) and <guilabel>Auto Hide Animation</guilabel> (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
<guilabel>Enable</guilabel> options and you can change the speed of the
animation using the sliders.</para>

</sect2>

<sect2 id="panel-looknfeel">
<title>Look &amp; Feel</title>

<para>Using the <guilabel>Look &amp; Feel</guilabel> tab you can
configure the panel's overall appearance.</para>

<para>The &kde; panel supports so-called <quote>tiled buttons</quote>. This means
that the buttons shown on the panel will be drawn using configurable images. To
enable button tiling, check the <guilabel>Enable background tiles</guilabel>
option in the <guilabel>Buttons</guilabel> tab. Then you can configure tiles for
certain kinds of buttons.</para> 

<para>For every kind of panel button there's a frame offering an
<guilabel>Enabled</guilabel> 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.</para>

<!-- Don't understand all of those. Maybe add this later or maybe it's not
all that important, as users will just try.

<para>The different kinds of buttons are:</para>

<itemizedlist>
<listitem><para></para></listitem>
<listitem><para></para></listitem>
<listitem><para></para></listitem>
<listitem><para></para></listitem>
<listitem><para></para></listitem>
<listitem><para></para></listitem>
</itemizedlist> -->

<para>The <guilabel>Background Image</guilabel> 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 <guilabel>Enable background
image</guilabel> option to enable this feature. You can specify an image
file in the line edit box below or choose one by clicking on the
<guibutton>Browse</guibutton> button. You'll see a preview of the
selected picture on the right.</para>

</sect2>

<sect2 id="panel-menus">
<title>Menus</title>

<para>In the <guilabel>Menus</guilabel> 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 directories and other
menus like the recent documents menu.</para>

<para>The <guilabel>K Menu Layout</guilabel> frame offers you some options to
configure the <guimenu>K</guimenu> menu's functionality. The <guilabel>Show
&quot;Bookmarks&quot; submenu</guilabel> and <guilabel>Show &quot;Recent
Documents&quot; submenu</guilabel> options will enable submenus showing your
<application>konqueror</application> bookmarks and the last documents you've
opened using &kde; applications respectivly. The <guilabel>Show &quot;Quick
Browser&quot; submenu</guilabel> option will enable a browser menu.</para>

<para><guilabel>Merge different menu locations</guilabel> 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
<guilabel>Applications</guilabel> 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.</para>

<para>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 <guilabel>Clear menu cache</guilabel>
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.</para>

<para> In the <guilabel>Browser Menus</guilabel> 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.</para>

<para>The quick start section in the K menu offers quick access to
programs you have used often or recently. In the <guilabel>&quot;Quick
Start&quot; section contains</guilabel> frame you can choose whether
this section will show the most recently or the most frequently used
programs. Using the option <guilabel>Max number of &quot;Quick
Start&quot; entries</guilabel> you can configure how many programs the
quick start section will remember.</para>

</sect2>

<sect2 id="panel-applets">
<title>Applets</title>

<para>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 <quote>internal</quote> 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
<quote>trusted</quote>. You might want to configure the panel to treat
trusted applets different from untrusted ones. Your options are:</para>

<itemizedlist>
<listitem><para><guilabel>Load only trusted applets internal</guilabel>:
All applets but the ones marked <quote>trusted</quote> will be loaded using an
external wrapper application.</para></listitem>
<listitem><para><guilabel>Load startup config applets internal</guilabel>:
The applets shown on &kde; startup will be loaded internally, others
will be loaded using an external wrapper application.</para></listitem>
<listitem><para><guilabel>Load all applets internal</guilabel>: will load
all applets internally, regardless of whether they're trusted or not.
</para></listitem>
</itemizedlist>

<para>For stability and security reasons, we recommend using one of the
first two options and that you mark only those applets as
<quote>trusted</quote> that come with the &kde; base packages.</para>

<para>To mark applets <quote>trusted</quote> or <quote>untrusted</quote>
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
<guibutton>&gt;&gt;</guibutton> button. This will move the selected
applet to the other list, while clicking the
<guibutton>&lt;&lt;</guibutton> button will move the selected applet of
the list of available applets to the list of trusted ones.</para>

</sect2>

<sect2 id="panel-extensions">
<title>Extensions</title>

<para>&kicker; has many extensions, which you normally add by
<mousebutton>Right</mousebutton> clicking on the panel and choosing
<menuchoice><guisubmenu>Add</guisubmenu>
<guisubmenu>Extension</guisubmenu></menuchoice>, and choosing an item.
Extensions are things like child panels, an external taskbar instead of
(or as well as) the one embedded in the panel, and much more.</para>

<para>You cannot add extensions in this page of the module, but you can
configure them.  The options on this page are disabled unless you have
added a &kicker; extension.</para>

<para>The options available are the same as those for locating the main
&kicker; panel, on the <link
linkend="panel-position"><guilabel>Position</guilabel></link> tab of
this dialog.</para>

<para>You can configure where on the screen the extension should be
(<guilabel>Left</guilabel>, <guilabel>Right</guilabel>,
<guilabel>Top</guilabel> or <guilabel>Bottom</guilabel>).</para>

<para>You can also configure if it has hide buttons visible, if it
should auto hide, and if so, how much delay before it hides
itself.</para>

<para>These options are configurable on a per extension basis, so you
can have different options for each one.</para>

</sect2>

<sect2 id="panel-author">
<title>Section Author</title>
<para>This section written by: Jost Schenck <email>jost@schenck.de</email></para>
<para>Minor update by Mike McBride
<email>mpmcbride7@yahoo.com</email></para>

<para>Some new options added by Lauri Watts
<email>lauri@kde.org</email></para>

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</sect2>

</sect1>

