Re: Window groups and multiple desktops

[Philipp Lohmann <Philipp Lohmann sun com>]

Am 01.09.01, 03:25:41, schrieb Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com> zum Thema 
Re: Window groups and multiple desktops:

> What do people think we should do for apps with multiple documents?

> I can see saying:
>  a) each document is in its own group, with dialogs that
>     are related to that document
> or
>  b) the whole app including all documents are in one group

> The problems with a) I can think of:
>  - you can't label the application menu "applications,"
>    it's actually the "main windows" menu
>  - apps like the Gimp have toolboxes/dialogs that apply
>    to all document windows; so what group do those go in?
>  - app authors are more likely to screw it up

is a) not already covered by the transient hint ?

> With b), the issue is that you can't minimize just one document.
> Might be inconvenient.

I think this might be more useful as an additional option in WM menus 
like "minimize whole group". This should IMHO not be what happens when i 
press minimize on a single window.

> I think b) is right; it will make more sense to users.

> Of course a WM or tasklist/menu that works in terms of applications
> instead of windows will be broken for some apps; e.g. gnome-terminal
> has all the terminal windows in the same group. I think this should be
> considered a bug in gnome-terminal (or rather a bug in GTK which
> doesn't support multiple groups in a single process).

Is an application based tasklist really useful ? A tasklist should 
contain all the "document" windows of an app (e.g. all picture editing 
windows of the gimp, or all documents of an office suit), because these 
are separate tasks for the user that he wants to minimize (or whatever) 
separately. The operations on the window group are IMHO better suited as 
additional options like "minimize whole group". This is what the user 
wants to do sometimes but not most times.

Regards, Philipp