I've been giving this a lot of thought recently, well actually, I've been irritated into giving it thought after not being able to find my Rhythmbox window. I've been trying to work out why we have "minimize to tray" functionality at all and all I can come up with is that it is because the window-switcher applet is so horrible.
The window switcher applet has a bunch of problems, mainly that each entry takes up too much space, and with an entry for each window you fill up the space pretty quickly. When that happens you can't read the titles of the windows, so you may have 5 Firefox windows and have to hover over all of them to find the right one. You can, of course, group them but even then that doesn't really help when each entry still takes up a large portion of the space and requires a click to access the windows in the group. It's because of this shortage of space that I believe "minimize to tray" exists. Minimize to tray is essentially "I don't need this window cluttering up my taskbar, but I need to leave it running" and the only reason I can think that normal bog-standard minimize isn't suitable here is because the window-switcher is cluttered and the window gets in the way. I've been running DockbarX for a little while now, which groups windows by their application icon, and displays a list of windows with *full* titles when you hover that icon with the cursor. The massive advantage of this is that you can open a hell of a lot of applications before you run out of room, in fact right now I have 12 applications (even more windows) running and I've not even filled half the panel and I'm not on a widescreen resolution either. In this situation minimize to tray is: a.) Effectively the same thing b.) A pain to work with because now there are two possible places that your window could be minimized to So, my suggestion is that we remove the minimize to tray functionality from the indicator applet for apps outside the messaging menu and replace the window-switcher with DockbarX or some other switcher which follows a similar principle. I'm not saying DockbarX is ideal, but it's a massive improvement on what we have already. Luke. _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ayatana Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ayatana More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
