Re: Thoughts on window sizing - now tiling

[Greg K Nicholson <greg gkn me uk>]

> A key point to the idea is that you make the gnome-shell overlay the
> first place to learn about this, so that people can realize that there
> are improvements to the ways they arrange windows now.  Then once they
> are familiar with that, the system can teach them about holding down
> Ctrl.
>
> My preferred way to do that would be to pop up a tip notification the
> 2nd or 3rd time they join windows together like this - so you're just
> teaching the people who are actively using it.
>
> And once somebody has learnt about the ctrl key modifier (if that
> proves possible), the nice thing is that it preserves existing
> behaviour, while still making tiling very seamless.  Most of the time
> you can drag windows around as normal, but any time you want to tile a
> bunch together, you just hold down ctrl any time they get close.
>
> It makes separating windows easy too - drag without ctrl and the whole
> group moves.  Drag with ctrl and you split a window off.  Let go of
> ctrl while dragging, and you can place that wherever you like, without
> any danger of it sticking to another window by accident.
>

Actually, yeah—that makes a lot of sense. Great idea.

I don't think we even need the Clippy-type [;)] tooltip. MS are using
video demos (i.e. advertising) to introduce jump menus (right-clicking
on a taskbar button): I think we could get away with publicising the
modifier key in the Gnome 3.0 release-buzz. It'd certainly get
mentioned in an Ars Tech, Register or Lifehacker review, for example.