Re: Idea for closing workspaces that contain programs

[Milan Bouchet-Valat <nalimilan club fr>]

Le dimanche 10 mai 2009 à 08:37 +0100, Ross Smith a écrit :
> Hi guys,
> 
> Please let me know if this isn't the best place to discuss new ideas,
> I'm pretty new here :)
> 
> After adding a new workspace, I hit this bug that stops me removing it:
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=581209
> 
> But it got me thinking - while adding workspaces is great, and
> integrates with the workflow of launching applications really well,
> the closing a workspace process feels a bit clunky.  I have to
> manually close every program on that workspace, then click on the
> Activities menu, and then click a button to close it.
> 
> What I would like to suggest are two new features for closing workspaces:
> 1. Allow the user to close any workspace.  If there are programs on
> there, ask if they should be closed or moved to another workspace.  If
> you think this is feasible, it pretty much resolves bug 581209.
I'd like to make this possible in Mutter/GNOME Shell, that would be nice
to have together with the Activities feature. I don't think there's a
real limitation in Mutter except a few places were the code does not
expect to remove a workspace other than the last one. What's the
developers' feeling about that?

> 2. Allow users to drag one workspace onto another to close the
> original workspace and move the programs in one motion.
That can be an idea, but anyway I think that if we allow to close any
workspace, we'll have to move its windows to the next one. So that may
remove the use case for your proposal.

> And a quick thought for creating workspaces:
> 3. Allow users to drag programs onto a blank 'new workspace' area, or
> onto the '+' symbol to open a new workspace with that program on it.
> I'd also maybe be tempted to change the graphic styling of the '+' to
> make it look like a faded or greyed out mini workspace (you could even
> include the users background).
I guess that can be done relatively easily. About the graphical change,
I think you'll have to draw the picture first! ;-)


> And how about:
> 4. Instead of dragging to launch a program and stay in the menu, could
> we think about a way to launch a program on a specific workspace and
> immediately switch to it?  I would suggest that launching multiple
> programs is likely a power user thing, so either ctrl+dragging, or
> right-click dragging would make sense to me as methods to launch a
> program and stay in the Activities menu.
> 
> I can't see regular users who drag wanting to do anything other than
> launch a single program and go to it.
Makes sense, indeed. Maybe we can agree on this?