hi there, as some of you might know, i was always pretty interested in usability in general and the usability of the panel especially (part of my education also addressed usability issues). so, after feeling rather annoyed for all the time since xfce4-panel and especially the launcher plugin was changed ignoring the long usability discussions some years ago, i finally fully patched the launcher plugin. there's the following issues being addressed: - the hpane did only stretch the item details, it now stretches in such a manner that the item list is stretched as well -- grabbing te hpane simply is more trouble than grabbing the window frame for resizing and seeing the list content. - the menu sort order was simply wrong for bottom-panel setups, it is reverted to the old behaviour as has been discussed some years ago, but leaves the user the choice to alter the sort order via a checkbox. - there were no seperator items, they are supported now and can be switched on easily instead of any item. the previous settings are stored, so reverting to the regular image menu item will display the previous settings. - the icon could be chosen only via the complicated and comparatively slow icon chooser; the icon image name can be entered manually again as was the case in 4.4 before with the icon name of an icon inside of the path, and the image is updated then. vice versa, when selecting the icon manually via the icon button, the entry is updated. now, it is very convenient to create a new entry by simply copying and pasting the item name to its entry name field, icon name, command name. 1 second for a new entry, that's a good dialog. - people were somehow confused by the old and new sort order with the first item being the panel item (the attempt to revert the sort order proves that). so there's a separating entry inside the item list as well now. this solution is still suboptimal, it would be way better to fully separate panel item and menu list but still offer all the moving via the arrows. i might change my implementation and offer a new patch if desired. - in 4.2, menus could be grabbed. they can be grabbed again now. you sometimes simply want that feature. kewl thing. sorry for offering one big patch only, but due to all the interaction inside of the launcher plugin, changes were difficult to achieve and thus i addressed all of them at once, jumping from here to there. it would be good to offer a really usable launcher plugin with the new 4.6; a very good basement has already been established, and the updates to the launcher plugin are only the very least consequences. the new dialog can be seen at http://home.arcor.de/timystery/pub/xfce/xfce4-launcher-dialog.png ; the new menu at http://home.arcor.de/timystery/pub/xfce/xfce4-launcher-menu.png . cheers fabian
Created attachment 1821 Patch for the launcher plugin as of r27883. Somehow the automatic attachment-adding failed, so here's the patch...
Marking as invalid, 4.8 panel will have a totally different launcher dialog and I'm not going to add separators, because then you're probably better of with the menu plugin and (in the 4.8 future) a custom menu file.