gnome-panel's context menu is not accessible when icons are too large

[Mary Gardiner]

If your icons occupy an entire visible panel, as in the left panel of the
attached screenshot, it is impossible to find a context menu for the panel. No
matter where I right-click on the left-hand panel, I get a context menu for one
of the icons, not for the panel itself. It is thus impossible to resize this
huge panel.

Further, it is impossible to move it, because left-clicking and holding will
either open a menu, or move one of the icons, never the panel itself.

(I did not idly make my panel look like this, bug 12124 explains how it came to
look like that.)

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=121606: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=121606

[Mary Gardiner (puzzlement)]

Created an attachment (id=1100)
Screenshot of enormous, unresizable, left-hand panel

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

you can select the panel with ctrl-alt-tab and then open the menu with ctrl-F10
which is shortcut for the menus in the GNOME applications. Does it fix your
issue ? Any suggestion on how to improve that ?

[Mary Gardiner (puzzlement)]

Thanks, I didn't know the key combinations. (It's is also of course accessible
through gconf.)

I'd prefer it if it was always possible to activate the context menu with the
mouse somehow, but I don't have a specific suggestion about how to implement this.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Upstream bug about this:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=121606

[George Farris (george-gmsys)]

I suggest for a top panel as an example: If you slide the mouse right up as far as it will go, there should be something like a one pixel line where one can right click to get the menu.

[Hans Häggström (zzorn)]

I also ran into this problem when I resized the panel to be 30 pixel high instead of 24 (the application launchers grew to touch each other and cover the whole panel space)

Rather than requiring users to hunt for one-pixel spots that can open the context menu, why not simply add the panel context menu as a nested menu on the context menu of any items in the panel? E.g. after the 'Remove from panel' and other context menu items of a launcher, there would be a 'Panel Menu >' item, that has a submenu with the original panel context menu.

This is not a perfect solution, as some panel items override the default panel item context menu with their own (e.g. the Window List), but it would work for many cases. It's also not that elegant, as it involves a context menu with a submenu. Some other alternatives are to enforce a few pixel cracks between panel items so users can access the panel, or to include some special non-removable 'panel handle' panel item for dragging the panel and accessing the context menu of it.