unity-design team mailing list archive

[Brandon Watkins <bwat47@xxxxxxxxx>]

 Unity badly needs better ways to deal with applications that have multiple
windows open. Currently if you have a program with multiple windows open,
and you click its icon on the dock it just brings every window to the front.
This is terrible behaviour and would be downright overwelming for new
users.

Some solutions could possibly be:

1. Reversing the currently default behavior. Currently single click brings
all windows to the front. Double click brings up scale. Unity is supposed to
be easy to use, new users would not know to double click, instead they will
click and be assaulted with windows. IMO single click to bring up scale and
double click to bring forward all windows would make more sense.

2. Windows 7-like thumbnails. Hovering over and/or clicking the icon could
bring up thumnnails that you could click on to bring forward the desired
window.

3. Slide-Down thumbnails. When you have multiple windows open there could be
OSX-Like thumbnails in the launcher, but hidden until you click the app
icon. For example you would click the application icon and if it has
multiple windows open thumbnails for these would slide down from under the
icon in the launcher. For this to be intuitive there would need to be an
indicator on the dock icons that shows it has multiple windows open.

Also for the second two to work some of compiz's shortcomings would need to
be fixed (Currently does not show thumbnails for minimzed windows)

Also scale needs some improvements:
When you bring up scale there should be an X button on the top right of
every window so you can close windows within scale (See: Gnome Shell)