Spy der Mann's Journal: Dude, where's my taskbar?

I'm getting a little frustrated (OK, I'll be sincere - freaking annoyed) by KDE. If anyone can give me pointers to fix my problem (and no, switching to GNOME won't help), I'd really appreciate it.

One of my favorite features in Windows 9x to XP is the taskbar. Specially the one-click shortcuts. They're the greatest productivity boost I've seen in Windows. Even if they don't fit all, you press the little arrow in there and choose from a menu. In my install, the icons were only 22 (or less) pixels wide, so they didn't use up any space. I could even resize the shortcuts area.

But the interesting thing is this: When I resize the taskbar to make it taller, the shortcut icons (and actually all the icons in the taskbar, including the systray) arrange themselves in rows. This is space efficient, and it doesn't clutter my precious tasks area.

Now... what happens if I modify the panel in KDE and make it larger? The icons don't arrange in rows. They GROW instead. Ugh!! Come on! Who was the genius who programmed them to do that? Instead of using less space, they use MORE.

I know, I can put them all in a menu, but that loses the one-click functionality. Due to repetitive strain injury, I can't afford to click too much on the mouse, it hurts every time I click!

Really, I miss the Windows taskbar. And don't come and tell me it's an old Windoze habit that needs to go away, because it's not. It's productivity.

Please... help! :(

Update: tqft kindly invited me to explore and investigate. Now I realized there's an applet (I never knew there was something called "applets" in KDE) called "QuickLauncher" that does just what I was looking for. I can sigh with relief now! :) My taskbar has been optimized.

Right click

[tqft]

Have you tried these

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=490006 [ubuntuforums.org]

http://docs.kde.org/development/en/kdebase/quickstart/using-taskbar.html [kde.org]

ie Right-clicking and playing with the options?

Re:

[Spy der Mann]

Wow - thanks! Actually it wasn't in the options. But there was a new applet called "Quicklauncher" that was *JUST* what i was looking for.

Kudos to you :)

Re:

[tqft]

I spent 2 days on and off trying to get ntp installed and working when I first setup my current machine (old one wouldn't hold time no matter what) this time last year.

ntp wouldn't apt-get install or install via synpatic nor could I see what the hell was going wrong.

Right click on clock select preferences.

I know your pain.