How to hide a specific mate-panel in Ubuntu?

Question

I often want to hide my sidebar (from mate-panel's point of view it is called the bottom panel). Just to have more space. And unhide it, with a keyboard shortcut. So temporarily, not forever, to have more space and order on screen. How do I do that?

Answer 1

1) Write a script, that toggles the autoHide value. (So the panel is not gone for good, but you get the extra space):

#!/usr/bin/env bash

hide=$(dconf read /org/mate/panel/toplevels/bottom/auto-hide)
# toggling it...
[ "$hide" = "true" ] && hide="false" || hide="true";
dconf write /org/mate/panel/toplevels/bottom/auto-hide $hide

( For some reason that value is not visible in the dconf-editor. )

2) Assign that script to a key in mate-keybinding-properties → custom shortcuts.

(F10 appears like a good choice to me. F9 is often toggling a sidebar, for example in caja and pluma, F11 is also about screen space, toggling FullScreen).

Update: enhanced version

reduce it's size when you intend to hide and throw from right to bottom (on the right, one is far likely to inadvertily trigger the auto-show when grabbing a fullcreen (or right-side-snapped) windows' scroll bars...

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# contributed to → https://askubuntu.com/q/843027
hide=$(dconf read /org/mate/panel/toplevels/bottom/auto-hide)
# toggling it...


if [ "$hide" == "true" ]
then
  #unhiding
  dconf write /org/mate/panel/toplevels/bottom/auto-hide false
  dconf write /org/mate/panel/toplevels/bottom/size 140
  dconf write /org/mate/panel/toplevels/bottom/orientation "right"
else
  #hiding
  dconf write /org/mate/panel/toplevels/bottom/auto-hide true
  dconf write /org/mate/panel/toplevels/bottom/size 2
  dconf write /org/mate/panel/toplevels/bottom/orientation "bottom"
fi