Re: Dynamic Workspaces - Proposal

[Jesse Hutton <jesse hutton gmail com>]

On Mon, Aug 22, 2011 at 3:57 PM, Federico Mena Quintero <federico gnome org> wrote:

On Sun, 2011-08-21 at 17:41 +0200, Ralph Hofmann wrote:

> I use my workspaces based on topics. Workspace 2 is multimedia,
> workspace 3 is Gimp and so on. I have 6 workspaces.
>
> So I would like to be able to send an application for example to
> workspace 6 even if workspace 5 doesn't exist yet.

The problem is that empty workspaces disappear.

I think that behavior could be improved by not closing empty workspaces automatically. When one has 5 workspaces open, is on workspace 3 and closes the last open window there, they suddenly have the rug pulled out from under them (on current F15, at least); they're dropped into overview mode and suddenly find themselves on the last empty workspace, which has now become #4 since what was #3 disappeared.

It's extremely jarring and unintuitive to be teleported like that. It's also comical how if you are on workspace 1 with a single application window open in Gnome Shell and you focus the window and hit ctrl + shift + alt down repeatedly you get this kind of yoyo effect where you go to workspace 2, but then are suddenly jerked back to 1 since there's nothing there anymore and it disappears. It would make more sense if it just created new workspaces to place the window on and didn't close the empty ones, which would fit in nicely with the above proposal.

Jesse