hein added a comment.
The problem is that there's no universal agreement among users as to what they want to see in your example case. Many users who set up a narrow vertical panel want labels to collapse away, and lowering the threshold (which btw was already done for 5.9 - that magic number was 5 instead of 7 until recently) breaks their existing setup. It's easy and reasonable to point out that, given that Icons-only Task Manager exists and is bundled by default these days, the regular Task Manager should try harder to keep showing labels, as users who only want icons can, well, use ITM. The problem is that the use case for ITM is muddier than that though, for historical reasons - aside from collapsing labels, ITM also comes with a number of long-established behavior changes; it really implements the "dock pattern" while regular TM does not. This keeps some users on TM but still want label-less buttons on a vertical panel. This is a big hairy knot we need to untangle to make progress, and ideally without taking the lazy way out of adding a checkbox for all the things. And again there's also a certain opportunity space for third-party aftermarket customization via the Store, the bundled widgets don't necessarily need to support every whim. So, there's a bunch of options, and all of them kind of suck: a) Change defaults in TM to maximize text in vert orientation (less tall buttons, lower collapse threshold), ask users whose setup this breaks to use ITM, make things they don't like about ITM confiurable or tell them to suck it up and see how that goes over b) Add some sort of abstract Less/More text slider or combo box config option, shown only in vert mode c) Instead of text make that option about Taller/Shorter buttons, or icon size, or something d) ... REPOSITORY R119 Plasma Desktop REVISION DETAIL https://phabricator.kde.org/D4550 EMAIL PREFERENCES https://phabricator.kde.org/settings/panel/emailpreferences/ To: ppalaga, davidedmundson, hein, broulik Cc: plasma-devel, lesliezhai, ali-mohamed, jensreuterberg, abetts, sebas, apol
