Indicator applet doesn’t handle vertical panel

[Vish]

When a vertical panel is used, the indicator applet still renders its contents as if the panel were horizontal:

• The items are not centered properly. Instead, they seem to have a constant horizontal padding, which can cause the item to be attached to a panel edge or even be clipped by it.

• The items aren’t scaled down or rotated if they do not fit to the panel in a horizontal orientation.

• When the applet contains multiple items, such as indicator-messages and indicator-sus, they are rendered side-by-side, which completely hides one of them with a typical panel thickness.

[Vish (vish)]

Attaching a screenshot of the problem with right and left panels.

[Javier García Díaz (jgd)]

This bug affects me too (in my case, the icon is always on the left). In addition, the icon size does not change accordingly to the panel size.

[dei (cephos)]

still in karmic alpha5 --> no upstream-fix :-(

[Jeroen Hoek (mail-jeroenhoek)]

This is a panel on the left in Karmic alpha 6. The screenshot was taken to illustrate a different bug.

[Jeroen Hoek (mail-jeroenhoek)]

The misalignment is still an issue in Karmic beta.

[Javier García Díaz (jgd)]

Currently the button only is expanded in the Y axis, so it only works fine in horizontal panels.
For me the ideal solution would be dinamically adjusting the icon to fit the panel, not just changing X-padding in vertical pannels.
Sorry for insisting in this, but I want to remark that I'd prefer a solution based on scaling of the applet if possible.

[David Barth (dbarth)]

The indicator is really meant to be used with an horizontal panel. We have no plans for supporting different orientations.

[David Given (david.given)]

If the indicator is only designed to work in a horizontal panel, how do you intend applications like empathy which *only* work via the indicator to operate on systems which only have vertical panels?

[David Given (david.given)]

...have just figured out how to make Empathy work via a notification area icon (there's an Empathy bug that makes it non-obvious; see #435329). However, I still think that only supporting horizontal panels isn't a good choice. Vertical panels are a completely mainstream Gnome feature and are highly desirable for, e.g., making best use of space on a widescreen monitor.

If you truly do not wish to support them, then the indicator applet should at least say so when one finds itself in a vertical panel.

[eTM (juergen-mangler)]

"However, I still think that only supporting horizontal panels isn't a good choice. Vertical panels are a completely mainstream Gnome feature and are highly desirable for, e.g., making best use of space on a widescreen monitor."

I fully support David in this. Make it happen!

[mabawsa (mabawsa)]

Also I like to have a vertical panel. The Indicator applet does not auto-orientate according to panel orientation like the notification applet. The indicator applet is a totally unnecessary bit of software as it will be obsolete as soon as gnome 3 gets more up to steam (maybe in Murdering Monkey), and is nowhere near as polished as the notification applet.　I could do without it in Karmic as only empathy and evolution were involved. However to my horror there was no volume control, ibus or bluetooth in the notification area in Lucid. So it took me 3 hours to try to figure out that they were only in the indicator panel. Does anybody know how to move Ibus, the volume control and bluetooth back to the notification-applet so I can get my vertical panel back and rid the panel of the indicator applet?

[mabawsa (mabawsa)]

OK I just had to disable the indicator applet on the panel and add gnome-volume-control-applet to my startup apps. Fairly simple!

[Tim Fisken (tim2)]

I don't think "we don't support indicator applet in a vertical panel" is a satisfactory response to this. Currently, you can add an indicator applet to a vertical panel and get something that looks at first like it is working, but which doesn't actually function. If you aren't going to fix this bug properly, you need to at least check whether the applet is being added to a vertical panel, and handle the situation in some kind of graceful way, perhaps by informing the user that the applet does not work on vertical panels and then quiting.

[Vish (vish)]

Reverting status to wont fix as was set earlier by dbarth:
Also see , Bug #498182 , this is now a much bigger problem with vertical panels since the application indicators are also not able to handle vertical panels.
Bug #498182 , has some information.

[Vish (vish)]

Closing upstream task as well , Bug #498182 is more relevant now with the application indicator changes

[Jeremy Nickurak (nickurak)]

Is this actually invalid? Indicator-applet-session was at least usable in karmic on a vetrical panel. You could access the shutdown/logout/lock-screen UI.

In lucid, the "shutdown/logout/lock" UI is hidden by the vertical panel, meaning that you can't even get out of a logged-in session. AND the system-menu doesn't have those elements, because the indicator-applet-session has them, even though they're not accessable.

Now we have a regression that causes people migrating from a working karmic setup to a lucid setup they can't log out of, suspend, lock, reboot, or shutdown...

[Jeremy Nickurak (nickurak)]

If non-horizontal panels really aren't going to be supported, they should be dropped from the configuration options of gnome-panel.

[Jeremy Nickurak (nickurak)]

Just a heads up since this bug has a lot of subscribed/affected users

I've glommed the vertical-panel bugs people are talking about over on #498182, which at least listed as confirmed/triaged. People wanting to register that they are impacted by this bug should follow up there, by selecting "This bug affects me too", and/or subscribing.