Re: Window controls for GNOME 3

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 11:45 AM, Pat Suwalski <pat suwalski net> wrote:

On 25/02/11 02:20 PM, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote:

So out of curiosity, what sort of  tasks do both you and Robert do if
you don't mind me being nosy?

Normal day-to-day work and development. I have tonnes of windows opened, because I have to.

Right, I figured that you were of the developer type.  Lots of windows, compiling and what not.  I'm in a similar boat when I'm working on an IT issue.
 

I alt-tab between windows (Process/Window Grouping makes this a real pain), minimize them when I need to focus (mentally). When I don't need one (usually a browser), I use Ctrl-W or Ctrl-Q to close it. I only use the close button when my left hand isn't free, in fact (coffee?). Occasionally alt-F4 is appropriate if the others aren't implemented and my hands are already on the keyboard.

OK. 

I depend on the panel list of icons, because they show me a one-to-one mapping of my windows, minimized or not, *in the order I opened them*. This is where the Win7 strip definitely doesn't cut it for me, gnome-shell makes it much more difficult, and MacOSX makes me somewhat unproductive.

You probably can write an extension..  Probably as we expose different parts of GNOME through the shell.
 

Lastly, I absolutely hate virtual desktops. That might be an overstatement, but I avoid using them. Things get lost very easily, and it's a pain to set them up on every boot. I find a single desktop over two monitors the right balance. I'll keep a blank extra virtual desktop for when I need to quickly do something in programs that open way too many windows, like Gimp. That last example is the only thing I like about the concept of workspaces in Mutter.

I use virtual spaces a lot.  I cannot have more than 4-5 windows open at at time.
 

I think a better example, though, might be my brother. He's a uni-student/gamer, and he doesn't like to reboot, ever. He has at any given time, at least 25 Firefox or Chrome tabs open. He has at least 20 windows in his panel as well, right where he likes them. I predict that he would be very uncomfortable without that window-to-panel relation as well.

As an exercise, given an env like GNOME 3 and you had to come up with a new methodology what would you do?  I found that changing to GNOME 3, no minimize wasn't as bad as I thought it would be provided I keep the number of windows open to a minimal of 4.  There are a couple of reasons where I wanted to use the minimize:

1) privacy, someone is coming into my cube, and I wanted to minimize for instance my GNOME irc channel window.  Or I'm about to make a screenshot and I don't want to show certain windows

2) I have a jhbuild or some other thing sprouting debug messages and it's distracting me.  this is where the shelf or whatever seems like a good idea..  Moving to another workspace is also just as good in this case, if it is a jhbuild, but not if it is part of a task of a cycle of compiling/debugging.

3) An application is opening sub windows that I don't currently want to see right now

other than that it has been smooth.

sri