Bars beside desktop icons

[roosr63]

Hello everybody,

What is the use of the bars beside the desktop icons ?
The cross is delete, one for the options and the other two ? an arrow and a square ?
I rather get rid of these bars, anyone know where I can do that ?

Thanks

Rinke de Roos

[GreyGeek]

Re: Bars beside desktop icons

....
What is the use of the bars beside the desktop icons ?

The presence of those side bars tells you that your desktop is unlocked and the desktop icons can be moved, re-sized, configured or deleted. The applications the icons refer to are called widgets.

The cross is delete, one for the options and the other two ? an arrow and a square ?
I rather get rid of these bars, anyone know where I can do that ?
...

The circular arrow is a "refresh" button. The Square is a re-size button. Drag it and the size of the icon changes. If you hold your left mouse button down in an empty region of the side bar you can drag your icon anywhere on the desktop and drop it there.

To "lock" the icons after you have configured and/or moved them, press the right mouse when the mouse arrow is on an empty part of the desktop. The dialog that pops up will have an option to "lock widgets". Left mouse on that option and your widgets will be locked into their current size and position.

[roosr63]

Re: Bars beside desktop icons

Thank you so much for your extended explanation.

Greetings

Rinke

[Rog132]

Re: Bars beside desktop icons

> KDE Userbase
> Plasma:

Widgets that are docked into a panel usually have an Options menu, while those on the desktop have the configuration options within the 'handle', the shaded area which pops up when hovering over the widget. Clicking and holding the mouse on the blank part of the handle will allow you to drag the widget to the desired position.

You have four tools on this handle. The top one is the re-sizer. Click and drag on the tool to resize the widget.

The second tool is a rotate tool. Again, click and hold the tool, while rotating to the desired angle.

The third is the wrench or spanner which allows you to configure that particular widget's settings.

Finally, the fourth tool is the "expanded view" tool and is available only on widgets that support this feature, such as the Picture Frame or Web viewers. When clicked, the Picture Frame widget will, for example, open the currently viewed in an image viewer while the Web Slice widget will open the web page in a full web browser window...

[GreyGeek]

Re: Bars beside desktop icons

Thanks for correcting my error, Rog! 8)

I always though the circular arrow was a refresh because when ever I clicked on it (with the weather icon) it refreshed the map. Add "jump to conclusion" and my confusion was complete. This is a result when, after working with KDE for over a decade one stops reading any documentation and just assumes or experiments. Experiments can be wrongly interpreted.

So, this old dog learned something today.