Re: [Usability]killing programs in taskbar

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Dexter Filmore <Dexter Filmore gmx de> writes:
> recently wrote to this list that i can't kill programs anymore by
> right-clicking on the taskbar icon and selevt "kill" from the popup and was
> told this wasn't necessary any longer since clicking the close button had the
> same effect if the application didn't respond after 5 seconds or so.
> 
> Well, this is nonsense. It takes aeons *if* it happens, often enough it won't
> at all and I have to bring up a term and ps ax and kill -9 pid manually.
> I want this feature back.

It won't happen for apps that don't set _NET_WM_PING in the
WM_PROTOCOLS property. You can check with "xprop". File bugs against
apps that don't set it.

The feature is problematic on many levels. It's impossible to explain
to users how it's different from 'close', it won't offer to save
documents if clicked accidentally, and it isn't even what you want -
it simply disconnects the app from the X server, so if the application
is really stuck, the app won't exit - netscape 4.x used to get in an
infinite loop all the time, and disconnecting it from X didn't help
one bit. So to use "kill" as in "disconnect from X server" you also
have to know about falling back to "kill" as in typing kill in the
terminal. Or kill as in opening gnome-system-monitor and killing
there.

The metacity dialog offering to kill the app will actually send a kill
signal if possible, rather than just disconnecting the app from the X
server.

If you really want the feature, you can put a launcher on your panel
for "xkill" perhaps, or for gnome-system-monitor. Personally I never
used the feature anyway, though, even when it existed.

It's just awful UI, plain and simple. Understanding it requires you to
understand *multiple* extremely arcane technical details such as
"process," "X server," "network connection," "WM_DELETE message," and
on and on, and once you understand it the utility is marginal at best,
plus lets you lose data with no confirmation. I don't see how it's a
good idea.

Maybe you can describe your use-cases for the feature.

Havoc