On Tue, 2009-12-29 at 22:11 +0100, Rovanion Luckey wrote: > I do without hazitation agree that the current application-switcher is > too complicated. And that is the underlying problem that I was trying > to solve with my alt-not-closing-the-application-switcher idea. A > mouseclick outside of the switcher or esc will do the job of closing > it. > > Now samuels reasoning makes a lot of sense. > If the shell is shooting to become based around the idea of activities > such as conversation, entertainment and so on, it does not make sense > to have alt tab to be an application switcher.
This is not at goal of the GNOME Shell. "Activities" have nothing to do with your workspaces; they are the things you do with your computer like the applications you run, the documents you edit, etc. See the last section of the design document, titled "Activities and Tasks" for discussion of grouping activities. > In a Mac environment > where applications such as firefox does not need to have an active > window open to be running it makes sense to be application centric. I don't think this is the biggest part of the equation; if I had to list two reasons why application-based alt-tab (command-tab) works better on the Mac than it does in GNOME Shell they are: - The windows of the application raise as a group - Mac users don't maximize very much (and the "maximize" button doesn't usually full-screen the application) So you alt-tab to the application then click on the window if it didn't go to the right one. Your idea of not closing the window switcher if there are multiple choices is somewhat similar to that, though I'm not immediately sure whether it would feel weird to sometimes go immediately to the a window, and sometimes not. It shouldn't be very hard for someone to do a quick implementation if they want to to see how it works. (Also see Mutter bug https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=591639, "application_based mode improvements", though that's mostly about click-through behavior and I'm not sure includes raising the windows of an application as a group.) > Using the activities pane to switch between individual windows on a > workspace is not smooth What do you mean by "not smooth"? There's work on making the multiple workspace behavior match the current mockups in: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=593844 This adds separate modes for "all workspaces" and "current workspace" > and therefore there needs to be a tool to > switch between windows on a workspace, or activity if you so will. > Because there is and should be no permanent taskbar or dock in the > shell there needs to be an alternative way to quickly switch inbetween > windows on a workspace. Maybe this is what alt-tab should be used for > in the shell? The applications on the current workspace are always first in the current desktop. Which helps a bit, but yes, it does matter quite a bit how you use multiple workspaces in terms of what you want, and there are many different ways to use multiple workspaces. And certainly I don't think the windows versus apps question is finally settled - it's certainly harder to quickly switch between *windows* with the keyboard than it used to be and that's a problem. See also: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=601393 Which implements Super-<numbers> to switch windows. - Owen _______________________________________________ gnome-shell-list mailing list gnome-shell-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-shell-list
