I tried to save screenspace by moving my bottom panel to the right side of my screen but I just couldn't work that way.
It seems to me that the problem is that the window list applet is not designed for being used in vertical panels (like many other applets as well). I expected it to show the icons of the different windows using all availible space. But the applet had some sort of vertical limitation, which means that the buttons around the icons were expanded if I only opened one window or two and then got smaller and smaller the more windows I opened. Finally the icons had a width that was much smaller than the panel.
The window list area should use the whole availible vertical space. That way, the icons would have the size of the width of the panel, which the user can control.

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