Comments on: If the user will not come to the window, the window shall come to the user

By: Thomas Thurman

Thomas Thurman — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 03:36:38 +0000

@Jack: I was going to say I couldn’t help you on bug 319491, and I can’t with my Metacity hat on, but with my FUSA hat on, perhaps it’s a dupe of bug 543913.

By: Jack Tanner

Jack Tanner — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 03:30:48 +0000

This “bug” is merely a symptom of the lunacy that is multiple workspaces. (I’m only somewhat trolling.)

Let’s say you’re working on two things in parallel: writing an e-mail, and editing a document. What do you do to switch between them?

A: switch windows
B: switch tabs
C: switch workspaces

Or perhaps it’s a combination of the above! Isn’t that a bit much?

Here’s a bug that’s much more annoying to me: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=319491

By: patrys

patrys — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 10:36:10 +0000

Whatever solution you end up with (my favorite is “add hint to either raise or demand attention”) please please please don’t move any windows between workspaces. That’s really annoying and eventually you end up with all the windows in the same workspace (a taste of such failure is the “adding icons to notification area so that an application disappears or moves between desktops each time you click” trend popular among media players and IM apps).

By: Mathias Hasselmann

Mathias Hasselmann — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 08:17:57 +0000

> * Make the window demand attention– in other words, apply the downstream patch.
Thanks for pointing out, why Ubuntu’s Metacity doesn’t work for me anymore. I really started wondering, why it doesn’t Pidgin’s tray icon doesn’t show me the contact list anymore when clicking it. Now I know: I don’t have a window list applet in my panel, and therefore I don’t see this notification attempts!

By: Wolki

Wolki — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 05:38:13 +0000

I’m a bit confused, you say that what metacity is doing right now is bringing the user to the window, always. I’m unfortunately on Ubuntu Hardy and as such can neither check nor satisfactorily use workspaces, but I remember it the other way around, that it would bring the window to the user, always.

The way I remember how it used to work is this:

If I clicked an open nautilus folder (spatial), it would open and show that folder, moving it if necessary from another workspace to the current one. Now, it just blinks in the taskbar, and if I need that folder where I am (to move something in there for example), I manually need to move that folder to the current workspace.

If I wanted to play a certain song, I could click the rhythmbox tray icon and I would see the rb window, ready to be used. Now, it depends on whether I managed to remmeber hiding the window, if not I get the blinking thing again, have to go to another workspace to change the music, and then I opefully remember which workspace I was on and what I was doing.

And that was the way I liked it, personally. :)

I think the main problem is that people use workspaces in very different ways, by application or by task (or use radically different methods of determining tasks, which amounts to the same).

Some people have one firefox window on one workspace, and do not ever want to see another window on another workspace, because it is to them the “web” workspace. Other people have a programming workspace, or a doing research desktop, or a reading mail desktop, or similar things. If they want to read up on some api, or find bibliographical information on some paper, or read something referenced in the mail they’re reading evolution, they may not want to break with the task they are doing and have switch between workspaces all the time just to access both the other program and the web page they need.

This is not the same as preferreing tabbed browsing (since people might want to use tabs, and possibly even open in tabs instead of windows when possible) and still have the second behavior. I fear that this is a thing that will have to be ultimately decided by the user. gedit, for what it’s worth, iirc only allows the second behavior.

Anyway, more flexibility might certainly be a good idea, but I’m not sure the calling application will always know how to do it correctly… sure, it would work for pidgin, but I’m not sure every app that wants to present a link knows how I like to use my $BROWSER, and then we might get very inconsistent behavior between calling apps.

Sorry for ranting ^^;

By: Mark Doliner

Mark Doliner — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 05:25:49 +0000

Hey Thomas, if something tells Firefox to “open http://gnome.org/” is it possible for Firefox to detect if it has a window open on the current workspace?

If so it seems like you could “bring the window to the user, always” and Firefox could be changed to open a new window if it does not have one open on the current workspace. That wouldn’t require finding a way for the window manager to communicate with the application, would it?

By: Thomas Thurman

Thomas Thurman — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 04:22:18 +0000

@Camila: Hi, nice to have your input. I like your solution, because it has the benefit of consistency. I do think it’s pretty much the same as “ask the summoning application to give us a hint as to which of these it would like”: whether you summoned the window with the left or the middle mouse button is the business of the summoning application, and Metacity won’t have been paying attention. We only get involved when the summoning application calls us to present the window. But it may be that the summoning application can pass us a hint to tell us how to present the window, and in that case it could well be decided by which button you pressed.

By: Camila Acolide

Camila Acolide — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 04:04:41 +0000

I don’t know if Metacity is currently able to do this…
But isn’t it possible to implement the Firefox click behaviour?
People are already used to this!

For both Pidgin Chat and Firefox link in Evolution (the examples above):

Click with the left button: Bring window to user in current workspace.
Click with the middle button: Open tab in “other” workspace and demand attention.

Of course, if there are no Pidgin chat windows or Firefox windows already open,
they would be opened in the current workspace in both cases above.

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Tue, 22 Jul 2008 02:55:50 +0000

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