I'm using Linux Mint 16 KDE at the moment, and I have almost everything the way I want except for one thing.

Some KDE plasma widgets (eg. Lancelot Launcher and System Tray) in the panel produce a popup menu, and when the mouse is moved over each menu item a translucent highlight follows the mouse, highlighting the menu item that the mouse is over. The problem is that the mouse tracking is very slow, so that, for example, if the mouse pointer is moved from the top menu item to the bottom item, the highlighting lags way behind the mouse, slowly highlighting each item in turn until it eventually gets to the hovered item. I would like to either speed up the mouse tracking or get rid of the highlighting altogether.

Things I've tried:

- adjusting the Desktop Effects speed - this does not affect the panel widget menus.

- changing plasma themes - the menu item highlighting, and the slowness of it, is the same in every theme that I've tested.

- hunting through every system setting I can find

- searching the web - apparently nobody else is bothered by this

- search this forum - ditto

Any help appreciated.

To turn off Window Highlighting... Open System Settings, select Desktop Effects, then click on the All Effects tab. The effect you want to disable/uncheck is Highlight Window.

There is an annoying problem with the Kwin 4.x series in that, unlike Windows 7, there is no pre-delay to highlighting appearing but there is a post-delay to the highlight closing (when you move the mouse away from it). This is the wrong way round!! Sadly the KDE Developers think this is correct and have "hard coded" it in (changing the Desktop Animation speed, etc. will not affect this issue)... So basically the KDE Window Highlighting effect is rendered useless because it just gets in the way all the time...

Mr Gates

Thanks for the reply.

Unfortunately your suggestion doesn't fix the problem, as I already have the 'Highlight Window' effect disabled.

As you say, this seems to be a poorly done effect that just gets in the way, and lacks the usual configurability that I've come to expect from Linux distributions. I suppose I'll just have to put up with it until a better KWin version comes along.