Re: Arrow key window selector extension.

[privacy <privacy tanwald net>]

On 07/03/2011 10:55 PM, Jasper St. Pierre wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 3, 2011 at 4:50 PM, Florian Kuhnt<florian kuhnt gmx de>  wrote:
> > Great work!
> >
> > Am Sonntag, den 03.07.2011, 19:07 +0200 schrieb privacy:
> > > I have written an extension for selecting windows in overview mode with
> > > arrow keys. When you are in overview mode and press an arrow key, the
> > > most recently focused window will be selected and highlighted. As soon
> > > as you have navigated to the desired window you can press ENTER for
> > > activating the window or DELETE for closing it. Mouse events and other
> > > key events will terminate the selection process. I think the navigation
> > > logic should work with any window placement strategy and multiple
> > > monitors should also be supported.
> > Seems to work with native-window-placement-extension. Maybe in one case
> > the selection algorithm could be improved a little bit:
> >
> > When a window is placed and selected on the left of the screen and
> > another one is placed below it but a bit even more left, it's not
> > selectable by left-key, only by down-key. I think left-key would be
> > practical in that case, especially if you have a lot of windows and want
> > to choose the most-left window. Maybe this could be fixed without
> > breaking other cases?
> >
> > I'm not sure if I will use it, but it enables
> > one-finger-key-pressing-window-switching what can be useful in some
> > cases. Maybe switching workspaces and organizing windows on workspaces
> > would be another nice feature? (for example arrow-key workspace
> > switching by going all over to the right and window dragging via shift).
> >
> > On the other hand - is there a reason why such a feature isn't
> > integrated into core gnome-shell?
> I think we'd all want better keynav in the overview. See bug
> 644306[0]. Would you like to make this into a patch, Paul?
>
> > _______________________________________________
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> > gnome-shell-list gnome org
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> [0] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=644306
Yes, I could create a patch out of this. I did not find this bug and 
thought that only the ones with the gnome-love keyword are taken under 
consideration. But for testing an extension isn't that bad anyway.

@navigation rule improvement: Thanks for the advice. As soon as the 
windows are not on a perfect grid - which isn't even the case in the 
default placement - it is difficult not to get unexpected behavior. I 
tried to keep the algorithm as compact/generic as possible. In the case 
you've described there might be a problem if there is another window 
above the selected one. You could take the closer one but often users 
might end up at the wrong place... Still I will take a closer look at it.

@switching workspaces and organizing windows on workspaces: I thought 
about moving the selected window to another workspace by pressing the 
corresponding number on the keyboard. You can already switch to 
extra-workspaces on separate monitors with the arrow key. When you have 
selected one of the leftmost windows and you have a monitor on the left 
with additional windows the next left-key-press will select the 
rightmost window on that monitor.

Cheers, Paul