Re: Color coding in gnome-shell

[Florian Kuhnt <florian kuhnt gmx de>]

Hi Peter!

I'm not a developer but I experienced the same problem.

2011/5/28 Peter Goetz <peter gtz gmail com>:
> There is only one thing, however, that I think could be improved and I
> would like to hear you guy's opinion on it. Here's the problem:
>
> Whenever I have more than 6 windows open and most of them are Firefox
> windows with a white background it's very difficult to easily spot the
> window I am looking for when I'm in the activities view. And it
> doesn't even have to be only Firefox windows, even my Eclipse window
> with its white background is hard to find too. So I spend a lot of
> time searching for windows.

I face that problem very often, especially when using the standard
grid overview. When using non-fullscreen windows, such as nautilus
folder views the native-window-placement extension brings some
improvements.

http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-shell-extensions/tree/extensions/native-window-placement

Instead of using colors, windows can be found more easily by their
size/position.
If the fixed position could be improved for fullscreen windows, this
could help sufficiently (for me at least ;-)).


> One thing I noted though, whenever I look for my gedit window, I can
> easily spot it. It's because it has a blue background.

I don't have the blue background by I easily spot it because of the
gray background of the new iconbar. But as soon as every native Gnome
application uses this style, the feature will be gone.


> So I was wondering if it would be a good idea to introduce some color
> coding in gnome-shell, similar to those Firefox tab extensions that
> color the tabs in different colors. That would mean, when in the
> activities view, every zoomed-out window is overlaid with a color, or
> there could be colored colored bar next to the zoomed-out window, so
> it's immediately recognizable. I think it's not necessary that the
> color mapping is permanent across different login session, I think it
> would be enough if the mapping is fixed for a one session.

I'm wondering if using the color in overview will be enough. It could
be more consistent to have the color coding when switching
non-fullscreen windows by clicking them or in Alt-Tab as well.

The negative point of this is, that colors disturb if you are doing
color-sensitive work like image manipulation. Anyway colors have
psychologic influences, so if the colors are too present, they could
become annoying.

For further discussion and better reaching the devs you can file a
bug. (Check for existing ones before!)


Florian