Anybody here familiar with LXQt?

[depscribe]

Am still in the throes of configuration and am making progress, but have hit a bit of a stumbling block.

As noted elsewhere, the default settings for LXQt produce a little panel/kicker thing at the bottom of the screen. The 22x22px icons that live there are just too small. Bu plugging in a mouse I was able to set them to 48x48, which is just big enough to make them visible for touch use.

But now the panel takes up a lot of valuable screen space -- the screen is overly horizontal to begin with. Applications with text big enough to read are now wide, thin ribbons. This would not be as big a problem if the panel would autohide. Which, fortunately, it can be made to do. Problem is, there's no way to make it come back when it's needed. Well, it can be done with a mouse, but it can't be done with a finger. Carrying a mouse around, even the tiny bluetooth trackball I have around here someplace, kind of defeats the purpose.

What's needed is a key combination that will make the [expletive forgone] thing disappear and reappear as the user's pleasure; failing that, a key combination that will make it appear, giving the user time (the maximum it will stay visible with the autohide setting is 2000ms, or 2 seconds) to do what he hopes to do -- open the menu, launch an application from the bar, restore a minimized application, see what time it is.

LXQt is somewhat underdocumented, and I've been unable to connect with their user forums. I've found some developer discussion of something similar to this, but nothing that even suggests it has been done.

Anyone here know LXQt enough to know if it can be made to do this, to reveal a hidden panel by ketstroke, without the aid of a mouse?

Bonus for reading this far: if you go to the Wiki ( https://github.com/gemian/gemini-keyboard-apps/wiki/DebianTP ) and follow the instructions there, top to bottom, your Gemini Linux experience will be much better and, after you've done the stuff in the "Sleep On Close" section, pushing the silver button on your Gemini will cause it to tell you what time it is. (It says so on the Wiki, but I just tested it and it is cool, though the voice is a little like that of a robot that has had one can of motor oil too many -- but at least he's probably not reporting back to Google.)

Thanks in advance for any advice toward making the LXQt panel disappear and reappear when I want it to!

[vader]

What's needed is a key combination that will make the [expletive forgone] thing disappear and reappear as the user's pleasure; failing that, a key combination that will make it appear, giving the user time (the maximum it will stay visible with the

One simple way is to set the panel to autohide (as you have done), and edit your keyboard shortcuts. If you use the normal openbox WM, then go to ~/.config/openbox and edit the config file. You would normally have a Ctrl-Esc shortcut which brings up the menu. Find it and replace "lxpanelctl menu" with "lxpanelctl restart" for both primary and alternate configs. When you press ctrl-esc, the panel now restarts which shows it for X seconds, and hides again. A bit of an overkill, but it works.

Hope this makes sense. I tested it in lubuntu and it worked as expected. You can also use the keyboard shortcut menu item, but I prefer editing the file

[depscribe]

What's needed is a key combination that will make the [expletive forgone] thing disappear and reappear as the user's pleasure; failing that, a key combination that will make it appear, giving the user time (the maximum it will stay visible with the

One simple way is to set the panel to autohide (as you have done), and edit your keyboard shortcuts. If you use the normal openbox WM, then go to ~/.config/openbox and edit the config file. You would normally have a Ctrl-Esc shortcut which brings up the menu. Find it and replace "lxpanelctl menu" with "lxpanelctl restart" for both primary and alternate configs. When you press ctrl-esc, the panel now restarts which shows it for X seconds, and hides again. A bit of an overkill, but it works.

Hope this makes sense. I tested it in lubuntu and it worked as expected. You can also use the keyboard shortcut menu item, but I prefer editing the file

Thanks very much. As it happens, Openbox is not the WM shipped, KWin is. But there is possibly an analogous file. I will investigate. For now, I have autohide set, but after a bit of poking at the bottom of the screen I can usually get the panel to appear. Not satisfying.

[Adam Boardman]

I've updated the default key config so that ctrl-esc will launch the menu, to get this you'll have to update in the usual debian way and then remove your .config/lxqt/globalkeyshortcuts.conf then logout and login again. This would lose any custom shortcuts you've added so if you have added any then just move it out of the way and copy your own ones back in after its auto-repopulated.

[depscribe]

I've updated the default key config so that ctrl-esc will launch the menu, to get this you'll have to update in the usual debian way and then remove your .config/lxqt/globalkeyshortcuts.conf then logout and login again. This would lose any custom shortcuts you've added so if you have added any then just move it out of the way and copy your own ones back in after its auto-repopulated.

It works! Wonderful -- thanks!

An update: A few things people might find useful in connection with this.

When you first start LXQt you will find that the panel at the bottom of the screen is very tiny, imho unusably so. Fixing this requires a rodent, and probably at first this means a wired mouse. With it you can right click on the little panel and select "Configure Panel." There, you can set the panel height -- I chose 60 pixels -- and the panel icon size; I found 48x48 about as small as I could go while keeping things useful. But now the panel takes up a part of a small screen that has no space to spare. So clicking on "autohide" (with Animation duration" of 500ms and Show with delay of 2000ms, the maximum in both cases) makes it go away. Problem was, getting it back. Using a finger to get the little mouse pointer to the bottom of the screen to retrieve the panel was at best frustrating. But now Adam has added a key binding -- Ctrl-Esc will bring it back for however long is set in Animation duration and Show with delay. This means you don't need to carry a mouse around to bring your panel back.

Why do we care? Well, the panel contains the main menu and other stuff. The only thing Ctrl-Esc won't bring back is the "Quick Launcher" icons, and in that it opens the menu, that scarcely matters.

So this is a Very Good Thing.

[jornada720]

Having used the LXQt environment on my Gemini for several days, I must say it is maddening.

KDE Plasma would be a much, much better DE for the default. It has left mouse button controls on every item, such as task bars. It has options to force large icons and font sizes in applications. It has the very keyboard friendly KRunner keyboard search and launch system.

On all of these points, the LXQt experience is much worse. KDE also doesn't have an annoying taskbar that tries to give you a preview and thereby blocks you from clicking task icons to switch between them.

I would just switch to Plasma but unfortunately, the keys don't work properly in it

[jornada720]

Having used the LXQt environment on my Gemini for several days, I must say it is maddening.

KDE Plasma would be a much, much better DE for the default. It has left mouse button controls on every item, such as task bars. It has options to force large icons and font sizes in applications. It has the very keyboard friendly KRunner keyboard search and launch system.

On all of these points, the LXQt experience is much worse. KDE also doesn't have an annoying taskbar that tries to give you a preview and thereby blocks you from clicking task icons to switch between them.

I would just switch to Plasma but unfortunately, the keys don't work properly in it

I would be happy to help prepare a default KDE setup for the community with proper interface element sizing, matched GTK and Qt themes, and a Gemini wallpaper and provide support for it if the keys could be made to work within KDE. As it is, several keys do nothing within KDE and several other operating environments.

[ArchiMark]

Having used the LXQt environment on my Gemini for several days, I must say it is maddening.

KDE Plasma would be a much, much better DE for the default. It has left mouse button controls on every item, such as task bars. It has options to force large icons and font sizes in applications. It has the very keyboard friendly KRunner keyboard search and launch system.

On all of these points, the LXQt experience is much worse. KDE also doesn't have an annoying taskbar that tries to give you a preview and thereby blocks you from clicking task icons to switch between them.

I would just switch to Plasma but unfortunately, the keys don't work properly in it

I would be happy to help prepare a default KDE setup for the community with proper interface element sizing, matched GTK and Qt themes, and a Gemini wallpaper and provide support for it if the keys could be made to work within KDE. As it is, several keys do nothing within KDE and several other operating environments.

Not sure how well KDE Plasma would run on our lil' Gemini's....

That's probably why a lighter DE was selected in LXQt......

But let us know how it works, if you manage to get it running OK....

Mark

[mgfm99]

Having used the LXQt environment on my Gemini for several days, I must say it is maddening.

KDE Plasma would be a much, much better DE for the default. It has left mouse button controls on every item, such as task bars. It has options to force large icons and font sizes in applications. It has the very keyboard friendly KRunner keyboard search and launch system.

On all of these points, the LXQt experience is much worse. KDE also doesn't have an annoying taskbar that tries to give you a preview and thereby blocks you from clicking task icons to switch between them.

I would just switch to Plasma but unfortunately, the keys don't work properly in it

I would be happy to help prepare a default KDE setup for the community with proper interface element sizing, matched GTK and Qt themes, and a Gemini wallpaper and provide support for it if the keys could be made to work within KDE. As it is, several keys do nothing within KDE and several other operating environments.

Not sure how well KDE Plasma would run on our lil' Gemini's....

That's probably why a lighter DE was selected in LXQt......

But let us know how it works, if you manage to get it running OK....

Mark

I've used both LXQT and plasma on a Cubox-i which is a four core 32 bit arm system. The key thing is for kwin to have opengl acceleration, which I assume it does here. Plasma is a bit sluggish with respect to LXQT but not terribly so, and the additional power of the x25/x27 over the Freescale would probably mask the difference.

[jornada720]

Not sure how well KDE Plasma would run on our lil' Gemini's....

That's probably why a lighter DE was selected in LXQt......

But let us know how it works, if you manage to get it running OK....

Mark

I've used both LXQT and plasma on a Cubox-i which is a four core 32 bit arm system. The key thing is for kwin to have opengl acceleration, which I assume it does here. Plasma is a bit sluggish with respect to LXQT but not terribly so, and the additional power of the x25/x27 over the Freescale would probably mask the difference.

I have been using KDE on my Gemini and it works perfectly fine, except for the keyboard issue. KWin doesn't need OpenGL to run, either, just don't use desktop effects. The default Gemian setup uses KWin as it is, just with LXQt instead of KDE Plasma.

As for some other desktop environments, I tried using GNOME and it is a performance disaster without 3d acceleration. It also appears to have font sizing inconsistency issues that cannot be fixed without 3d. That's too bad because GNOME handles multitouch better than other interfaces. It also supports touch scrolling.

XFCE runs fine but you can't right-click to customize anything unless you have a mouse. You can get the font sizes to be bigger but there is no setting for icon sizing.

LXQt has a box for font sizing but it does not appear to work at all. KDE is the only environment where you can resize fonts and icons and which also lets you easily resize desktop elements using your finger. You can even make the scrollbar bigger.

[depscribe]

Having used the LXQt environment on my Gemini for several days, I must say it is maddening.

KDE Plasma would be a much, much better DE for the default. It has left mouse button controls on every item, such as task bars. It has options to force large icons and font sizes in applications. It has the very keyboard friendly KRunner keyboard search and launch system.

On all of these points, the LXQt experience is much worse. KDE also doesn't have an annoying taskbar that tries to give you a preview and thereby blocks you from clicking task icons to switch between them.

I would just switch to Plasma but unfortunately, the keys don't work properly in it

I would be happy to help prepare a default KDE setup for the community with proper interface element sizing, matched GTK and Qt themes, and a Gemini wallpaper and provide support for it if the keys could be made to work within KDE. As it is, several keys do nothing within KDE and several other operating environments.

Not sure how well KDE Plasma would run on our lil' Gemini's....

That's probably why a lighter DE was selected in LXQt......

But let us know how it works, if you manage to get it running OK....

Mark

Well, at the login screen there is a little box at the top on the left that says "LXQT." If you click on it, the resulting dropdown offers Plasma, so if you want you can give it a spin. Thing is, the optimizations, at least for now, are being made on LXQT. Which in my try of it proved to be true -- much in Plasma doesn't work on Gemini.

[jornada720]

Well, at the login screen there is a little box at the top on the left that says "LXQT." If you click on it, the resulting dropdown offers Plasma, so if you want you can give it a spin. Thing is, the optimizations, at least for now, are being made on LXQT. Which in my try of it proved to be true -- much in Plasma doesn't work on Gemini.

Yes, I've been using it several times. Everything in KDE works for me except some of the keys. Even the display brightness controls in the Taskbar work. What doesn't work for you?

[depscribe]

Well, at the login screen there is a little box at the top on the left that says "LXQT." If you click on it, the resulting dropdown offers Plasma, so if you want you can give it a spin. Thing is, the optimizations, at least for now, are being made on LXQT. Which in my try of it proved to be true -- much in Plasma doesn't work on Gemini.

Yes, I've been using it several times. Everything in KDE works for me except some of the keys. Even the display brightness controls in the Taskbar work. What doesn't work for you?

Some, as you note, of the keys, which are important on a device whose chief sellinh point is its keyboard. It *may* be possible to disable the KDE hotkeys and key combos and get back full use, but I haven't experimented with it. I believe I saw something to that effect, but would not bet a lot on it.