Re: metacity branched

[Jan Nieuwenhuizen <janneke gnu org>]

Havoc Pennington writes:

> subject pretty much covers it...

What are the plans for the development cycle?  I was having more and
more friendly discussion

   http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=140925

with several people and was wondering if and where to continue it
best.  I thought the matter was pretty obvious, but interesting points
have been raised.

If it is not already possible, I would very much like to have a way (a
hook?) to focus/pop-up an alternative libwnck menu list to experiment
a bit: get a feel for what kind of window menu/selection could really
work.

You say

    My .02 would be that if the user has to explicitly set things up,
    it's not a very good solution - maybe a few percent of users at
    most will do that.

which probably means that you are aiming a bit higher than I was.

Striving to make a more friendly window selection method for most
people is a lot more difficult that just providing programmability,
but it's also a more interesting thing to look at.

    To me there are already at least three ways of switching among
    tasks: Alt+tab/windowlist, switching workspace, and switching tabs
    ... adding another concept of how to group tasks seems like the
    wrong approach.

Your point of tabs and workspaces is quite valid, I think.  You add an
intersting suggestion, but not have a real solution yet.

If you would like to at it from my point of view, things are a bit
different: I do not and never have used the paradigm of
Alt-tab/windowlist cycling.  I'm not at all impressed by it's
usability and think that having another critical look at it would
benifit all.

    ... once you have a ton of windows you're sort of hosed when it
    comes to quickly finding the right one

Maybe you are, but I feel that with my method (or some other) of
grouping and cycling window classes you can handle a bit more windows
before you're hosed.

I hope we can do even better, I'd very much like to experiment a bit
improve the situation.  To that point I've already made a small
libwnck wrapper for guile-gnome and am rewriting the keywise.c popup
in guile.

Greetings,
Jan.

-- 
Jan Nieuwenhuizen <janneke gnu org> | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
http://www.xs4all.nl/~jantien       | http://www.lilypond.org