[Feature Request]: Hide labels on the Window List applet

[FuncProgLinux]

Thanks for the work and effort you put into this desktop. I don't know if this breaks any design guidelines or if the internal C API is not meant to do this (I'm not well familiar with C/GTK+).

I think it would be nice to let users opt-in for a more modern design by hiding the window labels on the Window List applet. Like the XFCE DE:

This shows only the icons which might come in handy for people using a single panel. This is already possible to "emulate" on vertical panels if you set the panel size to the minimum allowed:

Active windows are already highlighted as intended:

I don't know if a window counter/popup could help but if you are familiar enough with marco both Alt + Tab and Alt + Esc should do the trick.

This also could help users stop relying on third-party applets such as the mate-dock-applet which is outdated for anyone using MATE outside Debian/Ubuntu based distributions.

I don´t have much experience with C or GTK so I don't know how much I can contribute to this cause. I'll be happy to test the feature if that helps somehow :)

[lukefromdc]

We are shorthanded right now, so it may be a while before anyone can have a look at this

[FuncProgLinux]

We are shorthanded right now, so it may be a while before anyone can have a look at this

I understand. Sadly I lack the skills on C & GTK+ to try and contribute a patch, let me know if I can assist on this from another point, thanks for your answer :)

[balazs-endresz]

@FuncProgLinux This probably isn't very useful but you can hide the label with css in ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css and move the icon too, but not center it properly:

#tasklist-button label {
  opacity: 0;
}
#tasklist-button image {
  padding-left: 50px;
}

With gtk-inspector this gets applied live.

And it's obviously not for everyone but if you can get a local build working you could easily change at least the taskbar height here: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libwnck/-/blob/master/libwnck/util.h#L36
Also, commenting out gtk_widget_show (self->label); might be enough to prevent it from rendering the label, which should result in a narrower button: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libwnck/-/blob/master/libwnck/tasklist.c#L656

I don't know if a window counter/popup could help

There's already an option in the preferences to always group windows. (Right click on the empty space just before the first item in the panel.)

[balazs-endresz]

@FuncProgLinux Actually, the taskbar height can be changed in dconf-editor: /org/mate/panel/toplevels/bottom/size but that won't resize the icons unless you also change WNCK_DEFAULT_MINI_ICON_SIZE. (I've also done the latter just to make the icons fill all the vertical space)

[FuncProgLinux]

@balazs-endresz The CSS trick helped me a ton! It kind of breaks in my build (v1.28.7) but I think I'll be able to succeed with further tweaking, thanks a lot for your response!