unity-design team mailing list archive

[Gregory Merchan <gregory.merchan@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 4:06 AM, Gino Vincenzini
<openmysourcecode@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Why not just make "smart-raising" windows the default feature, its never
> useful in the vast majority of cases for the application to hide smaller
> windows behind itself... when that happens to me it makes me, in trolled
> style go FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!!!!!

That's pretty much the response I'm having to talk of "smaller" and
"bigger" windows. I'll be very surprised and puzzled if this is
actually a discussion about windows based on their size. There are
different kinds of windows and they have names. I suspect the smaller
windows spoken of are those things that are called "utility windows",
"palettes", "toolboxes", or things like that. There no One True
Dictionary, but using names from the Mac, Windows, Java, or GNOME HIGs
will be better understood.

How windows should be raised or lowered in response to user action is
something that can be defined and should be encoded into applications,
mostly at the toolkit level. The situation on X is more than a little
screwy because of years of doing it wrong.

I find that after however many months I've been using Unity, I am
still not comfortable with the available window switching mechanism.
That sort order changes in the spread view is one problem. Having to
remember that the window I want to switch to is part of whichever
application it gets grouped with is another problem. (Seriously,
applications are implementation details.) Really, there is no simple
window switching mechanism; the closest is the spread on Super+W. To
tie this back into the discussion of "smaller" windows, utility
windows (which should have a smaller title bar than regular windows)
should be left out of the normal window switching sequences; keeping
them in is, afaik, needed as an accessibility option.

This is just an impression I get, but it seems often when "smart",
"auto", or something like that is used as a prefix, it's attached to
something that wasn't being done properly in the first place.