There were a lot of complaints when we decided to limit the size of icons placed on panels in plasma to 32×32 pixels.

The reasoning behind limiting the size were requests from users who use vertical panels – vertical panels are usually made wider then standard panels, and icons would grow to 300×300 pixels taking up most of the space on the panel.

Putting a maximum size for icons was a good decision generally, but the bad side of it was that the new size was hard-coded. There was an option in the system settings to change sizes of icons, but setting the size for panel icons was disabled.

Now, thanks to a patch by Mike Kasick, this option is enabled and it works. Mike is one of the best types of users – although he isn’t a Plasma contributor (as far as I know – no SVN account) he sent us a patch, and responded to all of our suggestions with revised versions.

In the end, Aaron and myself adapted the proposed patch a bit to better fit the rest of Plasma, and it entered the SVN so it is on its way to KDE SC 4.5.

In KDE SC 4.5, the option is located in System Settings -> Application Appearance -> Icons -> Advanced -> Panel

The original Lancelot icon is usually considered weird-looking when seen on a panel (or desktop). Even I have had Lancelot set up not to use it.

I like the old icon very much, and I’m still proud I succeed in making something like that with a vector-graphics program (Inkscape) so it still is, and will be until the end of time, the main icon of the Lancelot project. But from now on, it will not be used for the applet button.

Now, the default icon is the standard KDE icon – the same one other launchers use.

For those of you who want to have a normal-looking icon but still want others to see that you are using Lancelot and not something else, you can use the following one:

The new icon can be set through the applet configuration dialogue.

This post will be short, I’m tired.

One of the common feature requests was to make the categories shown in the applet customizable – that is, to have the possibility to choose which categories are shown. Well, starting from the current SVN version, you can.

If you don’t use the contacts or documents section, just don’t show them. You could make it show only the applications section thus making Lancelot more simple and more ‘traditional’.

Mind that this only affects the launcher applet itself, when the categories are shown inside it, and not the menu.

In other news…

… a couple of insects known as bugs were squashed, and VIDE the Vim IDE is progressing nicely – I’ve moved Lancelot development away from the Project.vim plugin and similar and started using only Vide plugins…

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