I'm sure this has been discussed several times in the past, e.g. in bug #4414: https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4414 The Xfce panel 4.8.6 is wonderful, but myself and some others would like to be able to change the size of the autohidden panel. The 3-pixel line appears a bit too clumsy for my taste. I did some amateur hacking and built my own customized version of `xfce4-panel'. I added a property (`autohide-size') in xfconf that sets the width of the hidden panel. This can even be zero to make the panel disappear totally when hidden. However, the way this is achieved is not very clean: an invisible panel is actually one pixel wide but filled with black, so it is pretty close to not being there at all. You just lose one row of pixels from your screen edge. There are obvious problems with this approach; for one thing, the invisible mode doesn't look very good if the length of your panel doesn't cover the screen edge from corner to corner. Another bug is that when you do things like change your GTK+ theme, the invisible panel becomes visible again until you hover it. I have to tell you that I'm totally new to hacking Xfce (or GTK+ or Cairo) and I'm not at all sure if all my changes make sense. What I did was look at the code and try different things until it worked for me. I'll see if I can post a patch here later.
This is already implemented with a style property. You can also make the line transparent with the leave-opacity.
That's great news, thanks! What is this property called and how do I access it? I forgot to mention that I am aware of all the things you can do with compositing in xfwm4, but I prefer to keep it disabled because I have no need for the eye candy.
http://git.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-panel/tree/docs/README.gtkrc-2.0
So it is `XfcePanelWindow::autohide-size' then? Thanks. The code I've been looking at is the xfce4-panel-4.8.6 tarball, which doesn't mention this property in README.gtkrc-2.0 or anywhere in the panel code, so I had no idea it existed. Guess I should have used git? Is this the patch where the autohide-size property was added? It is dated 2011-05-28: http://git.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-panel/commit/?id=2d84329885b5754122f1a2613be8c4ab9d7925e8 It looks like the minimum value for the property is one pixel, so the only way to make the panel totally invisible would be to turn compositing on and use leave-opacity, right?
Yes that is the commit and indeed you need either master or wait for the next devel release.