Mate-panel (?) Feature Request: 'Sticky-Center' property for panel items

gordon · 2 June 2022 23:38

It's official: After putting a considerable amount of work into this feature, the center sticking feature is now an official part of the latest MATE Panel code. Once the next major release of the MATE Panel come out (and are included in distributions), the feature will become available to anyone (the typo in the below name is an unfortunate one):

github.com/mate-desktop/mate-panel

Add "center-stick" capability applets on the panel

committed 05:11AM - 06 May 22 UTC

thesquash

+459 -222

Conventionally, the applets on a MATE Panel are positioned relative to the left …edge of the panel (if the panel is horizontal) or the top edge (if the panel is vertical). There has also been some (buggy) support for positioning of applets relative to the right (or bottom) edge of the panel, so that applets on the right side of the panel will stay on the right side even if the user changes screen resolutions or if the panel changes size for some other reason. However, many users want to also place applets at or near the center of their panel(s). There is no such conventional support for positioning applets relative to the center of the panel, so users have positioned applets near the center of the panel -- but the position recorded is relative to the left side of the panel. As such, the applets will almost certainly shift over to the left or right slightly if the panel is ever resized, and the user will have to reposition all those centered applets yet again. This is especially frustrating if the user switches monitors on a regular basis! This patch radically revamps the MATE Panel's positioning framework, and deprecates the original "right-stick" feature. To replace the right-stick feature, this patch instead associates an "edge relativity" setting with each and every panel applet: An applet can be relative to the start (left/ top), end (right/bottom), or center of the panel. This setting can be changed using DConf/GSettings, using a custom panel layout file, or even by simply dragging the applet to the appropriate place on the panel. (Conventionally, applets are not even right-stuck automatically even when the user drags the applet over to the far right of the panel!) As a bonus, when the user drags an applet across the center of the panel, the applet will temporarily "stick" to the very center of the panel, to allow the user to very precisely align any applet they wish.

As it is, those who are willing to "live dangerously" can compile the very latest code from the "master branch" themselves and get this feature immediately.

I have also created some patches that you can apply to older or current stable versions of the MATE Panel so that you can gain this capability without waiting for version 1.28. You can apply them using the instructions found at How to modify and rebuild a package for Ubuntu MATE (or Ubuntu, or Debian). There are two versions of the patch; if you have version 1.26 of MATE, use this patch:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/thesquash/patches/master/FINAL_FOR_1-26-mate-panel_Center_stick_applets.patch

If you are still running MATE 1.24, use this patch:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/thesquash/patches/master/FINAL_FOR_1-24-mate-panel_Center_stick_applets.patch

Please let me know if the patches do not work as expected. Thanks in advance.