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I use Ubuntu 10.10. When I have a lot of windows open, it's hard to read them in the taskbar because there's only room for a few characters of each window's title.

How can I increase the number of rows available, like in Windows?

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@Will Sheppard Do you want to increase the number of rows programmatically? –  Searock Apr 15 '11 at 12:23
Nope, just manually! I've chosen the answer that specifically mentioned right-clicking on an "empty space" in the panel, as that particular instruction clarified the problem I was having. –  Will Sheppard Apr 18 '11 at 13:08

2 Answers 2

up vote 2 down vote accepted

You just need to make the panel higher. It will automatically use more rows.

Right click on some empty space in the panel, click on properties and select a bigger size, like 48 pixels.

Some screenshots:

24 pixels high taskbar 48 pixels high taskbar

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Thanks! The reason I couldn't get this to work before is that I never had any empty space left in the panel when I tried to right-click on it... –  Will Sheppard Apr 18 '11 at 13:08
Yeah, it did happen to me too. This is why I added the empty space thing ;). –  Javier Rivera Apr 18 '11 at 13:10
I just did this on my Debian system. I didn't have any empty space in the panel either, so I just switched to a different workspace; the size change applies to all workspaces. (I'm using Debian 6.0.8, but it should work for Ubuntu as well.) –  Keith Thompson Dec 11 '13 at 23:01
  1. Right click on the panel,
  2. Select properties,
  3. Increase the size parameter as you like,

The default setting on mine is 24, if you increase it to 48, I can have a double layer task bar, and so on.

One thing you might notice is on some window themes, they don't like double size panels and so you might get a stripe down the middle of it. In some window themes you don't get it. e.g. in Equinox Ambient (which is what I'm running at the moment) you get the strange stripe, in New Wave you don't (see below).


Single layer panel:

single panel

Double panel with artefact (Equinox theme)

double with artefact

Double panel without artefact (New Wave theme)

enter image description here

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