Re: Idea for closing workspaces that contain programs

[Ross Smith <myxiplx googlemail com>]

On Sun, May 10, 2009 at 11:49 AM, Milan Bouchet-Valat <nalimilan club fr> wrote:
> 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.

But what if I don't want the windows on the next one?  If I'm
organising my programs by workspace, I might just want to merge a
couple.  Just merging a bunch of programs without letting me choose
where to is something that will get in the way, not help.

>
>> 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! ;-)

Oh bugger, I'm no good at pictures.  Let me try again:

While the + symbol looks neat, and is obvious for creating workspaces,
I don't think it's so intuitive as a location to drag things to.  If
you could create a border around the +, and a workspace background,
you could make the + look visually like another small workspace.  I
think it makes two improvements:

- It's now even more obvious that the + relates to adding a workspace
- It makes it more intuitive as a location to drag programs to in
order to launch them


>> 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?
>
>
>