Thinking about the tasklist

[Benjamin Kahn <xkahn ximian com>]

• For a while now I've been frustrated by the GNOME tasklist.  For most of the things I need it to do, it does fine.  But it has a couple of behaviors that really annoy me.  So I've been trying to come up with a list of these problems and their solutions.

I'm not trying to replace the tasklist with anything -- although I'm sure people can come up with better UIs in general for the tasklist.  I'm simply trying to find behavior and appearance tweaks that can make the tasklist more consistent and usable.

• The tasks are sized according to the amount of text in window titles. Because applications which change their window titles frequently are very common, (Terminal, Mozilla, Red Carpet, etc.) this means that task sizes will often be changing sizes. Obviously if there is a lack of space for all the tasks, the tasks should be shrunk so they all fit. But they should not grow and shrink according to window titles. Additionally, if the tasklist is rotated into a vertical panel, the tasklist height is wrong since the text isn’t rotated. Bug 155870 Bug Patch
• The amount of padding around the icons and text in the tasklist is too small. Bug 155865 Patch
• The default icon showing a blank page is ugly and is the wrong size – thus it always looks blurred. Bug 155867 ()
• When a window title is too long to fit in the space provided, it should be shortened and ellipsizes should be shown. (…) Bug 155868 Patch
• Windows on the task list should be shown in the order that the windows appeared, not reorganized at will. Bug 155874
• When windows are grouped together, the right click menu should act on all the grouped windows. Right clicking on the group menu itself should allow you to act on a single window. Bug 155875
• Putting brackets [] around minimized windows looks ugly and may not be needed. Other ideas: Italics? Only dim the icon? Shrink the text size? Bug 155876
• When windows are grouped, and one of the grouped windows is the active window, the icon and the title of the grouped window should be from the active window. Bug 155878
• It would be nice to improve the title of window groups. One way might be to get the WM_COMMAND from the window properties and look that command up in .desktop files. This won’t work if no .desktop file exists for the application, and might not work well on remote applications. Still, this should improve the display quite a bit. Bug 155878

Anyway, I have patches for four of the problems already.  Comments?  Agreements?  Disagreements?