Re: Size of the panel

["Mark C. Langston" <skritch home com>]

> From: "Michael Rogers" <bastard_machine@hotmail.com>
> 
> >Is the panel size configurable? I would like to
> >have a panel with half of its actual height, so
> >I would have more screen area for applications.
> 
>  The panel grows in height to accomodate the tallest applet embedded 
> in it. If you create an empty panel it's only as tall as the resize 
> button arrows. Try making copies of the icons used by all your 
> launchers (including the background tiles) and shrinking them in Gimp, 
> then change the properties of your launchers so they use the tiny 
> icons and tiny background tiles. Maybe the panel will shrink to the 
> height of the new icons - only a guess, I'm afraid. Better would be an 
> option to use menu-style mini icons on the panel - I guess Gnome is 
> automatically resizing the menu icons, so why not do the same for the 
> panel?

The source code for the panel has a hardcoded minimum size of 48 pixels.
The icons for the button arrows are only the arrows themselves.  
To change the height of the panel, you must recompile the panel source
changing all references to this 48-pixel minimum (I believe that variable
is set more than once for some reason).

The trick becomes not only resizing all your icons, but changing non-icon
panel applets to use the smaller minimum size (e.g., the pager, the clocks,
the mailcheck, slashapp, etc. etc. etc.

I have done some work on this, but have not pursued it too actively since
I have so many other things going on at the moment, and since the source
tree is in a feature freeze.

The author of the panel code has also mentioned he's planning on 
incorporating the ability to vary the height of the panel in the Gnome
1.1 effort.

-- 
Mark C. Langston