unity-design team mailing list archive

[Jeremy Nickurak <jeremy@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

One of my big reasons for using minimize-to-tray instead of regular minimize
is that the "tray" exists independantly of the workspaces you're on.

Minimizing to the task manager could work... but it would be critical to me
that the "stickyness" of an application is preserved on minimize, and this
is something I've found breaks frequently in many window managers.

Another angle to this is whether minimized applications should actually
exist on any workspace in general. To me, the workspace does not include the
panel... the panel itself is sticky. Therefore, things in the panel
(including minimized applications) should also be sticky in the same way. I
should be able to minimize a window on workspace 1, and restore it in
workspace 2. Gnome 1.x's taskbar applet had an option for this, and I always
felt it was a much more natural implementation of the minimize metaphore. It
was removed as a "let's remove extra options" effort.... but I'd suggest it
could be worth revisiting as either a new default behavior, or at least an
optional behavior.

New users, I suspect, would be confused that a window that's minimized, and
thus doesn't "exist" on a workspace, can still be tied to a workspace.
Advanced users meanwhile might want to take advantage of that option.

On Wed, May 5, 2010 at 08:38, Luke Benstead <kazade@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> I've been giving this a lot of thought recently, well actually, I've
> been irritated into giving it thought after not being able to find my
> Rhythmbox window. I've been trying to work out why we have "minimize
> to tray" functionality at all and all I can come up with is that it is
> because the window-switcher applet is so horrible.
>
> The window switcher applet has a bunch of problems, mainly that each
> entry takes up too much space, and with an entry for each window you
> fill up the space pretty quickly. When that happens you can't read the
> titles of the windows, so you may have 5 Firefox windows and have to
> hover over all of them to find the right one. You can, of course,
> group them but even then that doesn't really help when each entry
> still takes up a large portion of the space and requires a click to
> access the windows in the group.
>
> It's because of this shortage of space that I believe "minimize to
> tray" exists. Minimize to tray is essentially "I don't need this
> window cluttering up my taskbar, but I need to leave it running" and
> the only reason I can think that normal bog-standard minimize isn't
> suitable here is because the window-switcher is cluttered and the
> window gets in the way.
>
> I've been running DockbarX for a little while now, which groups
> windows by their application icon, and displays a list of windows with
> *full* titles when you hover that icon with the cursor. The massive
> advantage of this is that you can open a hell of a lot of applications
> before you run out of room, in fact right now I have 12 applications
> (even more windows) running and I've not even filled half the panel
> and I'm not on a widescreen resolution either. In this situation
> minimize to tray is:
>
> a.) Effectively the same thing
> b.) A pain to work with because now there are two possible places that
> your window could be minimized to
>
> So, my suggestion is that we remove the minimize to tray functionality
> from the indicator applet for apps outside the messaging menu and
> replace the window-switcher with DockbarX or some other switcher which
> follows a similar principle. I'm not saying DockbarX is ideal, but
> it's a massive improvement on what we have already.
>
> Luke.
>
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-- 
Jeremy Nickurak -= Email/XMPP: jeremy@xxxxxxxxxxx =-