Panel (computer software)

This article is about the user interface widget. For the GNOME taskbar, see gnome-panel.

In graphical computer software a panel is :

• A widget commonly packaged as part of a Widget toolkit for a graphical user interface. See toolbar and dialog box

• A folder in some graphical operating system interfaces that provide tools for configuring the system and the drivers. See control panel.

Panels in Widget Toolkits

Panels in Widget toolkits often have no specific graphic characteristics, but are mainly used to group children widgets together. They allow to have a better control on the layout of the widgets.

For example, in this XUL definition, two horizontal hbox panels are enclosed in a vertical vbox panel, alongside with two buttons. This allows to be sure that the label and the textboxes for the Login and the Password fields are correctly aligned.

<vbox>
  <hbox>
    <label control="login" value="Login:"/>
    <textbox id="login"/>
  </hbox>
  <hbox>
    <label control="pass" value="Password:"/>
    <textbox id="pass"/>
  </hbox>
  <button id="ok" label="OK"/>
  <button id="cancel" label="Cancel"/>
</vbox>

See also

• Layout managers, used in Widget toolkits, are software components which have the ability to layout widgets by their relative positions without using distance units.