unity-design team mailing list archive

["frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx" <frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx>]

I think it would be more reasonable to enable a grid for resizing windows.
And moving a window should also default to gridded steps.
Lifting a window out of this grid should be possible with a modifier for
example ALT+SUPER.

After this is implemented, the importance of having keyboard shortcuts for
percentual pseudo-maximisation is likely to decrease drastically.

Also is it important to remember a windows position, which is far easier
with a fixed set of grid nodes than with XY coordinates.
A grid can be defined as e.g. 16 steps of the horizontally available screen
width and 9 steps of vertical estate for a typical widescreen resolution
setup.

This is a pretty finite grid definition, which would make it easy to "tile"
a window or an other kind of object upon drag & drop or move. XY "float"
coordinates can not achieve the speed, simplicity and precision of an
interface such as grid.

On Sun, Feb 26, 2012 at 02:45, Gabriel Pettier <gabriel.pettier@xxxxxxxxx>wrote:

> Le dim. 26 févr. 2012 01:21:44 CET, frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx a écrit :
>
>> On Sat, Feb 25, 2012 at 22:08, Gabriel Pettier <gabriel.pettier@xxxxxxxxx<mailto:
>> gabriel.pettier@gmail.**com <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>
>>
>>    <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<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.
>>
>>
> Yeah the real semi maximised state is nice progress, it's the loss of a
> very useful feature that worry me.
>