unity-design team mailing list archive

[Jo-Erlend Schinstad <joerlend.schinstad@xxxxxxxxx>]

If you press super+w, then you get a view of your open windows. Pressing
super+s or pressing super+numX2, then you get similar views. Since I don't
know if these have a collective name, I've chosen to call them superviews
for the purpose of this email. They have different things in them; windows
or workspaces (and perhaps other things in the future), and I'll just call
them items for now.

When you're in a superview, pressing alt+num has no effect. I think it would
be very beneficial if pressing and holding the alt-key would display a 
number
over each item, enabling you to switch between them by using alt+num. 
The idea
is that you should be able to work with superview items in the same way that
you work with tabs in most tabbed applications, like Nautilus and 
Firefox. You
should be able to rearrange the items and the numbers should reflect 
that. This
would also be consistent with how the launcher works.

Let me demonstrate the benefit of this approach by using some examples. 
Let's
say you have placed gnome-terminal at the 4th position in your launcher. 
You
have lots of open terminal windows that you use for different things at
different times. It becomes somewhat difficult, or at least cumbersome to
navigate between these windows. But imagine you could press super+44 to 
get to a
superview containing all those windows. You then press alt+1 to get to the
first window, alt+2 for the second, etc. If you know that you're not 
going to
use a terminal for a while, then you can just move it out of the way and 
forget
about it until you need it. Or if there is a different terminal that 
you'll be
using more, then you drag it so you get a comfortable alt+num combo to 
reach it.

This would be useful for other kinds of windows too, of course. I use my PC
for different things at different times. Sometimes, I make music. Other 
times,
I write software and at other times, I manage my network of VMs en physical
servers. That means I have a fairly large number of different highly useful
applications, but only a few of them are generically useful enough to place
on the launcher, so they become somewhat difficult to get to. "Super+w 
alt+num"
would help very much. Having to use arrow keys (which is difficult for 
the time
being) is cumbersome when you have many windows.

It would be useful for workspaces too. I would setup a music workspace, a
network management workspace, a general internet workspace, etc. When I 
want to
make music, I'd drag the music workspace "closer" (meaning it would get a
lower alt+num combo). The internet workspace would always have alt+1 
since it's
always useful, whereas the primary workspace I'm working with, would get 
alt+2,
etc. I might want to switch to my network overview workspace, to see 
graphs, etc
but I would hardly ever switch to my software development workspace 
while I'm
making music, so I could let the alt+num combos for workspaces reflect that.

What do you think? Is this possible to achieve?

Jo-Erlend Schinstad