Settings rework

[testlab833]

The goal is to get a hover effect for all panel widgets (by plasmoid name) besides certain ones that don't function as buttons on all panels. Stuff like spacers, separators and pagers don't need hover effects or any particular styling.

With the current configuration options I can't even tell how to do it for individual widgets on individual panels. I've tried the preset overrides and the hover effect I defined for the whole preset is still applied to the particular panel actors I've tried to "blacklist". Even changing the hover effect color doesn't seem to do anything.

Maybe down the road, the config options could use a little abstraction too.

For example when you style particular classes or groups of widgets and tray items, it makes sense to just apply the same widget styling logic to all panels. If you're styling panels themselves, maybe have three basic panel roles: dock (not full length), panel (full length) and sidebar (side panel wider than x pixels). This would vastly narrow down the amount of config the user has to do and that you have to test and support. After all the point is to change the UI as a whole, not to endlessly configure particular widgets on particular panels on particular screens.

[luisbocanegra]

With the current configuration options I can't even tell how to do it for individual widgets on individual panels. I've tried the preset overrides and the hover effect I defined for the whole preset is still applied to the particular panel actors I've tried to "blacklist". Even changing the hover effect color doesn't seem to do anything.

In the override you need to disable the styling for the hover too. It is not intuitive but is expected behavior, that way to stack small changes rather than having to recreate the same style on every override.

[luisbocanegra]

For example when you style particular classes or groups of widgets and tray items, it makes sense to just apply the same widget styling logic to all panels.

This is is a limitation of the implementation of per widget instance customization I implemented long ago, I plan to have a mode where it allows you to target per widget "name" instead of per instance id, that would allow to recreate the same widget styling on all panels that have the same widgets, see #357

[luisbocanegra]

If you're styling panels themselves, maybe have three basic panel roles: dock (not full length), panel (full length) and sidebar (side panel wider than x pixels). This would vastly narrow down the amount of config the user has to do and that you have to test and support.

I have thought about something similar to this, like a set of pre-made configurations to be shown on specific sections, that once selected are copied to the current configuration, sounds like a lot of work though.

[testlab833]

Yeah the preset override of the hover state is what I tried and doesn't seem to do anything. Even if it did, the behavior would be too labor intensive to configure.

Re configuration UI, I think the best way would be to just merge the override features into the main "Appearance" customization interface while breaking out the "panel" "widget" and "tray" options into separate sidebar items.
End result for the sidebar would be:

Presets
Preset Autoloading (move relevant context-dependent logic to the panel/tray/widget items below)
Appearance (break out into Pane/Widget/Tray)
Stock Panel Settings (move to Panel)
Panel (normal, dock, sidebar, parameterized by context as needed )
Tray
Widget (here you can customize effects for all widgets, all except, or only some and maybe add some contextual logic as needed)
Island (maybe create a special widget island grouping separator plasmoid for this)
General
Keyboard
About

This would result in fewer but more relevant and maintainable settings as opposed to the infinite configuration UI you have right now. I don't see the logic for "composing" or mixing different presets, applying them based on conditions to particular panels/widgets etc. A preset should be essentially be like a global theme for panels and everything in them and it doesn't makes sense to mix and match global themes.

[luisbocanegra]

Thank you for providing actually actionable suggestions. I think you gave some good points.

Preset Autoloading (move relevant context-dependent logic to the panel/tray/widget items below)

Does that imply there will be separate auto-loading conditions for each section? Currently that is done through presets, does that mean there will be another condition in addition to the "State" one? If so, that sounds way more complex to me to pull it off.

Or maybe I am the one over complicating things...

Appearance (break out into Pane/Widget/Tray)
Stock Panel Settings (move to Panel)

Agree

Widget (here you can customize effects for all widgets, all except, or only some and maybe add some contextual logic as needed)

All except/some sounds better than blacklist through overrides, I like it. By contextual logic you mean hover, expanded and so on, right?

Island (maybe create a special widget island grouping separator plasmoid for this)

Hmm this was suggested when I implementing the "islands" feature, but didn't like the idea of having to go into edit mode to manage them (edit mode is painfully slow on my machine).

But managing them per panel is not good either so it seems like a good tradeoff. Will need a way to ship and install that new widget and put some sort of tutorial in the islands tab.

[testlab833]

Does that imply there will be separate auto-loading conditions for each section? Currently that is done through presets, does that mean there will be another condition in addition to the "State" one? If so, that sounds way more complex to me to pull it off.

Yes I supposed it could mean separate conditions with the equivalent of a "preset" being assembled under the hood based on the array of satisfied conditions. The conditional logic could be pared down I guess so you're not juggling too many conditions.

But the fundamental point is that from the user perspective it makes more sense for the "auto-loaded" presets to be children of the current preset and not entirely separate presets being pulled in from elsewhere. They're basically collections of tweaks that are applied to the current preset based some desktop state.

For me it's not a big deal cause I don't use this at all - my panel is just black no matter what and I don't use widget borders etc - but for someone who wants the panel to go opaque if a window is maximized, it makes more sense to have that as rule config in the Panel section of the current preset.

By contextual logic you mean hover, expanded and so on, right?

No I mean the conditional stuff you have in preset auto-loading, depending on how much of that logic you actually want to keep for widgets.