Configuring
This section describes the ways can be configured. It's only about the basic settings, configuration of the applets are described in their sections
You can change the settings by either clicking Settings in the context menu or the submenu Configure Panel of the K Menu or in the in the module Look & Feel.
Please note that the settings in the General and the Look & Feel tabs only affect to the main panel while the behaviour of extensions is set in the Extensions tab.

The Panel Section

General
In the General tab you can configure some basic functionality of the panel ( functionality you'd find in other panel applications as well; later we'll come to the more interesting features).
In the Panel Location frame you can choose which screen border the panel should be attached to. Please note that usually the available space is used more efficiently if the panel is aligned horizontally, attached to the top or bottom screen border. If you want to play around with different settings you can change the panel's position even easier by dragging the panel from one border to the other.
The Alignment group lets you define, where is located when the size is set to less than 100%. This can also be done by draging with the to the place you want to have it.
The panel's style can be tiny, small, medium or large. Depending on which applets you use you may find that some applets work better at different panel sizes. You can also change the size by moving the mousepointer over the upper border of (assuming is at the bottom of your screen) and dragging it while holding the . When you do that, the style settings will switch to Custom
Please note, that switching manually to Custom doesn't have any effect and otherwise that you don't need to switch to custom to be able to resize manually.
Some people may not want to have take the whole width or height of their screen. The slider Percentage of desktop width/height to be used changes this behaviour. If you decrease the precentage, will either appear aligned left or top of the screen, depending on it's location. Checking the checkbox Expand to fit required size makes sure that is at least as big as needed to show every icon and applet.

Hiding
Depending on your screen resolution you may find that the panel takes away too much of your precious screen real estate. To save screen space, the panel offers an auto hide feature. When this feature is enabled, the panel will hide when the mouse cursor has not been moved over it for a configurable amount of time. If you move the mouse to the panel's screen border it will show up again. Check the Enable automatic hide option in the Automatic Hide frame to enable this feature. Using the Delay in seconds slider you can configure the amount of time the panel will wait before it hides. The checkbox Show panel when switching desktop makes sure that the panel will be shown on the new chosen desktop. Otherwise, if there are too many applets and icons on , two small scroll buttons will be displayed to scroll the whole panel.
When the panel's hide buttons are enabled you'll see buttons on both sides of the panel, with arrows showing to the screen border. If you click on one of these buttons, the panel will slide away in that direction. After that, you'll see a remaining show button in that corner, which will make the panel show again. Check the apropriate checkbox if you want the hide buttons to show up on any side of . Using the slider you can change the width of the buttons.
Using the Manual Hide Animation (for the hide buttons) and Auto Hide Animation (for the auto hide functionality) options you can configure whether the panel will softly slide away or just disappear. You can enable or disable both animations using the Enable options and you can change the speed of the animation using the sliders.

Look & Feel
Using the Look & Feel tab you can configure the panel's overall appearance.
The panel supports so-called tiled buttons. This means that the buttons shown on the panel will be drawn using configurable images. To enable button tiling, check the Enable background tiles option in the Buttons tab. Then you can configure tiles for certain kinds of buttons.
For every kind of panel button there's a frame offering an Enabled option to enable or disable tiled images. If tiles are enabled for this kind of button, you can choose a tile in the combo box below and the box on the right will show a preview of this tile.
The different kinds of buttons are:
K Menu Tiles 	 The icon for the K Menu will be displayed as a tile
Quickbrowser Tiles 	 The icons for Quickbrowsers will be displayed as tiles
Application Launcher Tiles 	 The icons which start applications will be displayed as tiles
Legacy Application Tiles 	 The icons for legacy applications will be displayed as tiles
Window List Tiles 	 The Window List icon will be displayed as a tile
Desktop Access Tiles 	 The Desktop Access icon will be displayed as a tile
Enabling the switch Enable icon zooming will give you the effect that 's icons will grow bigger when hovering with the mouse. This effect will not appear when the size of is set bigger than medium.
If Show tooltips is checked, small descriptions of the icons or applets will be shown when the mousepointer rests over an icon for some seconds.
The Background Image is a picture that will be used to draw the panel's background, just like you can use a picture for the desktop background. Check the Enable background image option to enable this feature. You can specify an image file in the line edit box below or choose one by clicking on the Browse button. You'll see a preview of the selected picture on the right.

Menus
In the Menus tab you can configure the panel menu's behavior. This affects the K menu you will often use to launch applications, the browser menus you can use to access directories and other menus like the recent documents menu.
The K Menu Layout frame offers you some options to configure the K menu's functionality. The Show "Bookmarks" submenu and Show "Recent Documents" submenu options will enable submenus showing your konqueror bookmarks and the last documents you've opened using applications respectively. The Show "Quick Browser" submenu option will enable a browser menu. Enabling the Show side image checkbox will display a neat image on the left side of the K menu. If the option Detailed menu entries is set, th K menu will show a small description besides the name of the application.
Within the K Menu Layout you can also define which dynamic menus should be displayed in the K menu by moving them from Available Menus to Selected Menus using the <<. They can be removed the same way by using the >>.
In the Browser Menus frame you can configure whether the panel's browser menus will show hidden files or not (hidden files on unix systems are those whose filenames begin with a dot) as well as how many files at most will be shown in a browser menu. The latter option may be especially useful if you have a rather small screen resolution, as then the browser menus will quickly fill up your screen when you browse directories containing many files.
The quick start section in the K menu offers quick access to programs you have used often or recently. In the "Quick Start" section contains frame you can choose whether this section will show the most recently or the most frequently used programs. Using the option Max number of "Quick Start" entries you can configure how many programs the quick start section will remember.

Applets
Applets are small plugins that extend the panel's functionality. comes with some applets but they may be provided by third parties as well.
Panel applets can be started using two different ways: internally or externally. While internal is the preferred way to load applets, this can raise stability or security problems when you are using poorly programmed third-party applets. To address these problems, applets can be marked trusted. You might want to configure the panel to treat trusted applets different from untrusted ones. Your options are:
Load only trusted applets internal: All applets but the ones marked trusted will be loaded using an external wrapper application.
Load startup config applets internal: The applets shown on startup will be loaded internally, others will be loaded using an external wrapper application.
Load all applets internal: will load all applets internally, regardless of whether they're trusted or not.
For stability and security reasons, we recommend using one of the first two options and that you mark only those applets as 'trusted' that come with the base packages.
To mark applets trusted or untrusted you can move them from one of the shown listboxes to the other. Just try selecting an applet in the list of trusted applets and click the >> button. This will move the selected applet to the other list, while clicking the << button will move the selected applet of the list of available applets to the list of trusted ones.

Extensions
In this section you can change the behaviour of the Extensions. Simply choose one of your extensions (⪚ Child Panel) from the listbox on the left side and adjust it's settings. Those are very similar to the settings on the General and the Look & Feel tabs.
The Panel Location group sets the location of the chosen extension. If the option Enable automatic hide is checked, the extension will be faded out automaticaly after the time in seconds set with the slider Delay in seconds. Marking the checkbox Show panel when switching desktop lets the extension show up after a desktop change.
You can toggle which hide buttons the chosen extension should have with the checkboxes in the group Hide Buttons. The slider Hide Button Size sets the size of the appearing hide buttons.

The Taskbar Section
This section changes the settings of the taskbar. Changes affect the external taskbar and also taskbar applets on or child-panels.
Show all windows 	 If this box is checked, the taskbar will show all running apps of every desktop. Otherwise, only the applications of the current desktop are shown.
Show windows list button 	 Checking this box will show the small window list button.
Group similar tasks 	 This is a feature introduced in version 2.2. If the option Group similar tasks is set, several instances of the same application are grouped together in one taskbar button.
You can define the mouse actions of the taskbar buttons with the settings in the Actions. Each action can be one of the following:
Show Task List 	Clicking with the mouse button will open a menu displaying all tasks in that group. If you click an entry of that menu with any mouse button, the corresponding application will become active.
Show Operations Menu 	 Clicking with the mousebutton will open a menu with all applications of that group, where every application has it's window menu as a submenu and there are some group specific entries like Close All which closes all applications of that group, All to Desktop which lets you define on which desktop the whole group appears and Maximize All, Minimize All and Restore All which appends those actions to all applications of that group.
Cycle Through Windows 	If this action is chosen, each click with the mousebutton on the taskbar button will activate one of that group's applications, one after each others.
Activate Task 	 Activate Task: Clicking with the mousebutton will activate the first application in that group without opening the group menu.
Raise Task 	 The first application of that group will be put in the foreground without giving focus to it.
Lower Task 	 The first application of that group will be put in the background. It won't lose the focus.
Minimize Task 	 The first application of that group will be minimized. If it is already minimzed, it will be restored again.
Please note that some of these settings only have effect if a taskbar button contains more than one application.
Sort tasks by virtual desktop 	 Checking this box will sort all taskbar buttons in a group for each desktop, otherwise they are sorted by the order they are started. This will not affect grouped tasks if they are spread over more than one desktop.
Show application icons 	 If this box is checked, every taskbar button will have the icon of the running application beside its title.