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Re: Fwd: About tiling window management in Unity

 

On Sat, Feb 25, 2012 at 22:08, Gabriel Pettier <gabriel.pettier@xxxxxxxxx>wrote:

> Le jeu. 23 févr. 2012 12:48:46 CET, gabriel pettier a écrit :
>
>  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.
>>
>
> I have a hard time beleving i'm the only one concerned about this here,
> some people are building vanilla compiz grid plugin  to get that behaviour
> back (https://bugs.launchpad.net/**compiz-plugins-main/+bug/**878820<https://bugs.launchpad.net/compiz-plugins-main/+bug/878820>see #34). Nobody miss the grid size cycling here?
>
>
I think good work is being done on the tiling.
For example we now have a visual indication for whether or not a window is
being tiled: the rounded window corners now disappear, once a window is
semi-maximized to either the left or the right screen half.
This doesn't work for vertical stacking of tiles yet, but i'm sure it will
be fixed soon, too:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/compiz/+bug/694302

unfortunately, the more (fancy) features you have in  an application, the
more expert manpower it will bind in maintenance.
The overall quality of a set of code is easier to maintain, if the code is
lean and focused on doing one thing well.

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