tasklist/reusing gnome-panel

[Colin Walters <walters verbum org>]

Hi all,

So right now in gnome-shell, I feel there's a tasklist-shaped hole in
my workflow.   We had a discussion about this here, and while
conceptually one might imagine that the overlay could take over the
role of the tasklist, it does not feel that way to me in practice
right now, and I'll describe why in a second.

What I'd like to do is discuss these aspects and try to figure out
whether we can modify the overlay in some way to fill this role, or
whether it makes sense to have a tasklist (and if so, then if/how does
the overlay change)?

Essentially what I use the tasklist for now is switching between
active applications quickly; it works quite well because I can just
toss my mouse down at the target I see, and one click switch.

The key aspect of the tasklist I seem to rely on is that it's
relatively stable, assuming you don't exit applications very often.
In contrast the overlay can lay things out in very different ways if
you open a new application.

Anyways, what I plan to experiment with is adding the tasklist back at
the bottom in normal mode; but when you enter the overlay mode, it
gets hidden.  My initial technical plan on this is just to reuse the
current stock GTK+ tasklist code.  We could do some sexy things if we
used Clutter, live previews on mouseover etc., but having the old one
would at least give us an idea of how the workflow might be with the
taskbar again.

One other technical note; if we are considering importing gnome-panel
code, perhaps we should consider also using gnome-panel (or just GTK+)
for the top area?