Re: Proposal for Workspace Labeling / Tagging

[Brion Vibber <brion pobox com>]

On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 10:19 PM, Nanley Chery <nanleychery gmail com> wrote:

I've been a longtime user of GNOME shell ever since its beta stages. I've found the design and workflow natural and easy to use in all but one aspect - working with multiple workspaces. Due of the small size of the workspaces in the stack, and the lack of visuals in the keyboard-based workspace switcher, the user inevitably loses time when switching between workspaces. This lost time is spent inspecting each workspace for a distinguishing visual cue to determine if they've found the workspace they wanted to switch to.

To solve these issues, I have written a proposal for manually labeled workspaces:
http://nanley.wordpress.com/2011/12/12/improving-gnome-shell-workspaces/

As well as a proposal for automatically labeled (tagged) workspaces:
http://nanley.wordpress.com/2011/12/14/labeled-workspaces-revisited-tags/

I would greatly appreciate your feedback and thoughts on these items!

Personally I find my workspaces are usually ad-hoc and temporary; often a workspace just has one app (Netbeans, or Eclipse, or Gimp, or VirtualBox). Simply showing the app name or maximized window title would "do the right thing" for me most of the time.

Being able to override that by clicking and typing another name could work well for longer-lived workspaces but I would hate to have to do it every time if they're not auto saved. :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / bvibber @ wikimedia.org)