Hi,

some desktop environmentals ship sidebars and widgets that were shown in something like a sidebar mode. In plasma it is possible to use a large panel as sidebar but the question is "should plasma give the user the posibility of using sidebars".
So the question is for which usecases sidebars are useful, how should they work and how can we protect plasma that an user defined sidebar is not cluttered.

Hello,

I'm not quite sure of what you mean by widgets shown in sidebar mode. Is that something like a customizable Activities sidebar ? A big panel that shows up when you press a button (or a shortcut) ?

Louis

Yes like you wrote, but be open in mind it`s the design finding prozess.

The constraint is thus the limited width, while a lot of vertical space is available. This is useful for displaying list-like content (search results, notifications, updates, messages, networks…). Some average-width widgets will also fit (graphs, weather, analog clock…), but one alone won't use the whole height.

Potential design problem: if a sidebar is triggered by a button in the (bottom) panel, its top will be far from the mouse. Since lists are typically ordered by relevance, the most relevant item will also be the hardest to reach.

Louis

I think the best way to integrate the concept of desktop sidebar is by the cashew. For example, adding an option at the end might be called sidebar mode. Thus, it would be possible to transform the cashew in a sidebar, and sidebar in cashew. The sidebar should integrate the cashew menu and the most used plasmoids. A good example of the latter may be the U-Bahn concept by Kai Uwe.
http://blog.broulik.de/2015/11/pursuing-awesomeness/