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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Re: Allocating a virtual desktop automatically [was: thoughts on
From:       Lubos Lunak <l.lunak () suse ! cz>
Date:       2004-09-04 9:31:05
Message-ID: 200409041131.05417.l.lunak () suse ! cz
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On Tuesday 31 August 2004 23:53, Maurizio Colucci wrote:
> This is an idea which came to me during the previous conversation.
>
> First I noted that the k-menu is a list of applications, but the taskbar is
> a list of windows.
>
> Idea # 1
> -----------
>
> "Let's modify the taskbar to make it a list of applications (not windows)"
>
> Now Lubos lucidly notes this is impossible: some app can have more than one
> instance running, and the user must be able to refer to a particular
> instance.

 I hope I haven't said that, it certainly is possible. It's just that it's not 
that simple as different apps tend to provide necessary information in 
different ways. KWin needs to the ability to group windows by application 
e.g. for the focus stealing prevention feature. And the code for that is 
messy :(.

>
> Idea # 2
> -----------
>
> "Ok, but at least let's make the taskbar a list of application instances."
>
> You may think this is already possible, with taskbar grouping. This fooled
> me for a while, but it isn't correct: taskbar grouping groups all the
> instances of konqueror into one button. Instead, we want a button per
> instance.
...

 Are you willing to code that for Kicker's taskbar? If yes, I'd like to see 
that happen, because the current way of Kicker's deciding what to show and 
what not is rather "random" in this regard, and in the worst case the taskbar 
kcm can handle one more checkbox ;).

 I can help with the technical side of it, but I'm afraid it'd first require 
finding out what the right way for applications to provide this information 
would be. As I said, the code in KWin is messy and apps do it differently, so 
it'd be good first to agree how it actually should be done properly. 
Something for the kwin@ mailing list or maybe even the wm-spec one.

> 2. KDE shall automatically allocate a virtual desktop for gimp. When the
> user clicks the gimp button on the taskbar, the view will change to that
> virtual desktop, which REMEMBERS the active window. Voila'.

 I think I explained on this list few days back how to configure KWin to do 
thing using the window-specific settings. But I don't see any reasonable way 
how to do this really automatically.

-- 
 Lubos Lunak
 KDE Developer
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