unity-design team mailing list archive

[Tony Pursell <ajp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 2011-06-03 at 15:27 +0200, Jo-Erlend Schinstad wrote:
> 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.
> 

What a super idea. Since going to Unity, I use Super-W quite a lot,
being very forgetful of what applications/widows I have open, and where
they are.  But the only way I have to select one of the windows, is to
reach for the mouse and click on it. This is anathema to me as a lover
of keyboard short cuts.  I hate having to reach for the mouse just to do
a simple single action.  So numbers on the windows to select them, or
some other scheme of keyboard selection would be great.

Tony