Re: Enhanced Gnome tools

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Fri, Jul 18, 2003 at 07:47:04PM -0400, Paul Smith wrote:
> %% Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com> writes:
> 
>   sm> Grouping seems to do for me in GNOME2.3 what it did in 1.4;
>   sm> bunches of windows get put into one button which makes a drop-down
>   sm> list.
> 
> Odd.  Havoc Pennington said there was an open bug about it.  You'd think
> if it were implemented already someone would have closed the bug.  I'll
> look.

It's not implemented (well, there's grouping, but it groups windows in
the same process, not windows in the same class).

It isn't remotely hard to implement, if someone would do it.

In fact writing an entirely new window list is a weekend project; 
"libwnck" does all the hard parts and contains all the complex code,
you just have to code up whatever specific GUI you want.

The window menu someone else mentioned is already available as an
applet, but if it weren't, here's how hard it is to write using
libwnck:

 [hp dhcppc3 libwnck]$ wc -l window-menu.c
    129 window-menu.c

I think it took me about half an hour.

In short, it's amazingly trivial to write any kind of window list or
pager or window menu kind of gadget, I'm very surprised in fact that
people haven't written lots of these things. If you write one with
libwnck it will even work with KDE and many standalone WMs.

Havoc