I have the Home Page using this menu item. I have 6 categories set in the menu item parameters. Currently, 2 categories have no items in them, yet K2 is "saving" a space for them in the display. Categories 1, 2, 3 and 6 have items, categories 4 and 5 do not. I have it displaying 3 columns so I get:

Article Article Article

Space Space Article

Surprised it doesn't have the logic to ignore empty categories. Or have I just missed that in all the settings?

In truth, I'd actually like to have the latest 4 items from any category, but don't see a way of doing this. So it might be that the latest 4 are in Wine, or 2 in Wine, 1 in Travel and 1 in Read, for instance. A la a blog "Latest posts" type of module.

Hello,

If you add a category its data will still show up even if there are no items, in order not to show a category (or a user) simply do not select them.

For the number of items you want to show, locate the "Maximum number of items per user or category" setting in the options tab.

How about adding a "Show empty categories YES/NO" toggle like many other components have?

You misunderstand the second part. I am wanting to show the xx newest posts pulling from ALL categories. I don't see a way to accomplish this. Essentially, as I said, I want it to work like a Latest Posts blog module.

Actually you opt in which categories to display, so a switch is not really necessary. A switch would be handy when selecting parent categories or batch actions eg: show ALL subcategories in a category view.

Yes a switch would be very helpful here. I had article showing nicely in the frontend, but I changed Categories | Display Settings | Other Layout Options | Catalog Mode to Yes, as that was the setting I needed elsewhere on the site. Now, of course, I have almost no articles shown on the front page. This is really frustrating.

Under the K2 menu items | Options, there's a dropdown to Fetch Items from Children Categories, but it doesn't work. Unless you select 2+ categories it can never be set to No. What's the point of it even being there? If I could set this to No with one category chosen, that would fix my problem. But, as soon as I save, it reverts to Yes.

The catalog mode will show items that are included in that category ONLY. It will never fetch items from subcategories. The label of that fields cover this issue.

Unless you select 2+ categories it can never be set to No. What's the point of it even being there?

If you select multiple categories and you want different settings that the ones set on these categories.

If you want to edit the settings of a single category, simply change that category's settings.