unity-design team mailing list archive

[Jan-Christoph Borchardt <jan@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

(Sorry for the post-dump, I somehow could not post to the list when I
changed my Launchpad mail address.)

On 5 May 2010 16:38, Luke Benstead <kazade@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 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.

I agree. Scanning 7 icons and choosing the sub-windows from there is
much faster than scanning the whole width of the panel.


> 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.

Exactly, it is not only about saving space but also about shoving
background programs somewhere they do not annoy like they do in the
taskbar.


> 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.

Me too, additionally I have Global Menu running. For everyone who does
not use either, I attached a screenshot.

(Info: I renamed the menu labels with http://gist.github.com/382015 –
I also customized the DockbarX-theme.)


>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

As I said above already, it is not just the saved space but also the
saved time because of saved looking and mouse movement. Incredibly
handy.


> 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.

Another choice would be window-picker applet. I would have used this
in favor of DockbarX (before I knew theming) but the white title bar
with close button is just too annoying.

An important part that is missing from both DockbarX and Global Menu
though are the window controls. There is NameBar but that has
redundancies with Global Menu and is not nearly as great as Global
Menu. But wait – if you do not use maximus, you do not have a problem.
:)

Attachment: dockbarx-globalmenu.png
Description: PNG image