unity-design team mailing list archive

[Kristoffer Lundén <kristoffer.lunden@xxxxxxxxx>]

2010/6/28 Frederik Nnaji <frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx>

>
> would resizing in a grid not help with all this? It would be easier to snap
> application windows to each other this way. It would also make resizing
> faster in general as far as i can imagine.
>
>

A grid is an interesting idea, especially if we are thinking about a grid
with maybe 9 or 12 squares in all. I use a plugin off-and-on (forget the
name wight now though) in Compiz that allows me to resize windows to
percentages of the screen, which I have set to resize to say full height +
2/3 of the width from left for the browser, then to layout 3 terminals
evenly on the last 3rd, and other use cases like that. This is not so very
usable though, and is not nice enough (which is why it's on-and-off). But
building upon that, what if there was a way to resize applications that did
not involve dragging and adjusting (cumbersome), but rather clicking, on
large arrows (or similar) that appears under the mouse when hovering around
the edges/corners?

I'm thinking that these arrows could expand or shrink the window in quite
large steps (3rds or 4ths of the screen perhaps, possible also resolution
dependent how many steps), and also have an extra step wherever the content
would fill the window perfectly.

It's just a spur-of-the moment idea, so there's no actual thought behind it,
but I'm thinking that precision resizing is almost never what you want. I
resize windows to either see more content (preferably exactly all, such as
totems 1/2/0 can do), or to arrange windows so they can work together. If
that's true for most of the cases apart from maximize, then perhaps snapping
in large intervals and making it easy to click instead of dragging is a way
to go. (The hover thingy may not work well on touch screens, alternatives
welcome).

I see how this could go towards being a tile-based window manager, but
that's not what I'm after, just something that would make it easier to
adjust the windows so that the content inside becomes easier to view and use
- the idea as written above is not good, but maybe it could spark something
that is. :)

/ K