unity-design team mailing list archive

[gabriel pettier <gabriel.pettier@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everybody

First, i want to point I'm overall very very happy with Unity efforts, 
and i speak out loud about it since Natty, it's a great thing, and it 
helped increasing my productivity a lot, while getting me back to a more 
"standard" desktop (was using wmii before, as gnome ergonomic didn't 
feel productive at all).

However, in Oneiric, something that I, and a lot of people that i know 
use, have been broken, and as i understands it, the current intend is 
not fix it, or provide an alternative solution, but to break it further, 
for consistency, and i'm quite disappointed about it. As bug reports and 
their numerous duplicates about this didn't lead to a fix, i understand 
it's something which has to be discussed with the design team, to find a 
solution that is both useful to proficient users, and new users that 
shall not be confused.

I'm talking about the resize cycling of windows when using 
ctrl-alt-numpad. When unity went out, in Natty, using ctrl-alt-4 and 
ctrl-alt-6, the first use would semi-maximize left or right, and any 
consecutive press would change the size, not the position, of the 
window, that allowed to quickly organize windows, without being forced 
to the 50%/50% ratio. For me, it was a selling point.

Oneiric broke it, with more than a few bug reports about it (#878820 
#879218 #893017 and others, sometime wrongly marked as duplicate of 
#876591 which is different and was fixed). Discussions in #878820 
indicate that while the same behavior for 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 is still working 
(albeit not nearly as often useful), the fix will be to break them too.

What I don't get is what is the problem with this behavior? What's the 
rational to break it (although as i understand it, the break wasn't 
intentional at first)? And, in the end, is there any way to either get 
it back and adapt it to new keyboard shortcuts (as i understand there is 
change to come on that front)?

Please keep in mind that i appreciate your work, and just want the 
awesomeness in unity to shine, not to disappear, i more than welcomed 
the default activation of Tiling in unity, and the vast superiority 
those keyboard shortcuts conveyed, to the equivalent features in windows 
OS, and I'm just saddened this *killer feature* just disappeared. (In 
fact, i was expecting improvement on the tiling front, like stacking, 
moving a window from one screen to another in dual screen and such, but 
hey, that could wait).

Anyway, thanks for your time and your consideration. I really hope we 
can find a solution to this issue.