Panelizer

Purpose:

Implement a desktop panel that doesn't eat tons of megabytes of memory, yet is efficient and featurefull through its applets.

Memory efficiency is accomplished by running every applet within the panel's process. As a result, the panel shown below only eats less than 1MB for a panel plus 10 applets. Compare this with a disgusting 45MB of an equivalent Gnome panel !

Applets are not stored as executable programs but as shared libraries, and are dynamically loaded by the panel when they are created. Shared libraries must conform to a simple ABI, that allows to create several instances of the same applet, and manages configuration data for the panel and each created applet.

Configuration is stored as XML with the same Choices system that is used by ROX-Filer. Don't care about it, it's all managed automatically.

Everything was done so that people with decent programming knowledge can develop new panelizer applets quite easily.

Currently implemented applets:

• launch menu (uses Open Desktop compatible entries)
• clock
• CPU instant load bar
• mail notifier (biff)
• removable drive mounter and ejecter
• network traffic monitor and (limited) launcher
• memory monitor
• audio mute

Why:

I was not satisfied with memory usage of either KDE/Gnome panels or WindowMaker dockapps.

At start panelizer was just a toy to prove it's possible to make a panel that don't eat several megabytes of memory, but I end up using it everyday now, so it's time for public release.

Requirements:

Gtk+-1.2 and gdk-pixbuf to run. Plus Glade and GNU make to build.

Where:

C sources are in this tar-gzip archive: panelizer 0.5.

The traditional screenshot:

The future:

• more applets
• implement vertical layout (and possibly others)

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