Solve Crowded Panels By using A Drawer

By , Published December 3, 2009

Ever wanted to hide excessive icons on your panel? Just pop them in a drawer!

  1. Right click the panel with the excessive icons
  2. Choose 'Add To Panel'
  3. Select 'Drawer'
  4. Move it to where you want it
  5. Add the icons you wish to hide to it.

Now there may be one or two issues you don't like when using the drawer applet.

Not wide enough
You can easily make your drawer wider to accommodate your applets: -

  1. Right click the drawer applet
  2. Choose 'Properties'
  3. Set a sufficient size for your applets. Try 80px's.

The Icon Sucks
You can easily change the icon for the drawer applet: –

  1. Right click the drawer applet
  2. Choose 'Properties'
  3. Click 'Select Icon' and choose a new icon.

Background doesn’t match
You can choose the background for the drop-down drawer stack from the preferences menu. If you use a custom panel make sure you choose it.

Arrows look lame
Again, from the preferences menu you can switch off the “hide” button and the arrows within it.

Finally…
Doing all of the above gives you something like this…

    Article originally appeared on omgubuntu.co.uk

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    2. Tip: Make The Main Menu Button Pop Up Quicker
    3. Speed Up Auto-hide Panels
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    • rAX

      Is this the only solution? because the drawer is buggy(unexplained delays when you open it, sometimes you just can’t open it!!) and they didn’t fix the problems.

    • Anonymous

      This is great! I’m Canadian, so it’s useful to just have a little maple leaf sitting in the corner which holds the French character pallette for when I need to do something in French.

      C’èst supér-bon!

    • http://owaislone.org/ Owais Lone

      Dude…Which theme is that?
      Sorry for going off topic.

      BTW, still waiting for your android custom theme. Any updates?

    • Adam York

      This is great, but why is it so slow to open? Any way to fix?

    • bromalex

      Gnome Panel Drawers are notoriously slow to open and this bug as been documented for ages and it seems there is no workaround for this, so I stopped using them :-(

    • psypher

      personally i agree with rax, drawers actually suck and are completely useless to me due to the same things rax mentioned. ok wait i lie, i have one drawer in whihch i have 2 cpu scalers for my dual core inside, saves space on the panel. but for shortcuts to apps, this works well: what i do instead is create one folder called favourites in the gnome main menu. inside that menu i create the subfolders i want with shortcuts of the apps i want in the subfolders . then right click on the one of the apps in the menu, go entire menu and add this menu to panel. MUCH better effect than the drawers. opens quickly, smoothly, with compiz effects, no resizing needed and can have custom icons. just perfect. :D

      • rAX

        Drawers work well when you switch Compiz off, now I use an applet called “quick-lounge-applet” it saves you the troubles of making menus and shortcuts, and also works well under Compiz.

    • http://netgator.blogspot.com/ maxim

      I use drawer and I found it really helpful. Though it is a lazy tool, but helps me a lot. But I don’t know how to arrange icons horizontally as shown on snapshot.