Comments on: The window menu

By: CTenorman

CTenorman — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 17:05:52 +0000

I’d like to put in a vote for another option here: tile windows. The number of times I simply want to view all my open windows without manually re-arranging them is pretty high. It’s standard windows functionality, and I find it very useful. I have to use gnome-do at the moment and ask it to tile the windows. In metacity tiling works, there’s just no menu option for it.

By: A meta-post about blogging « ᛏᚦ

A meta-post about blogging « ᛏᚦ — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 22:18:37 +0000

[...] subsystems for CSS theming and window matching, and whether applications should be able to extend the window menu (so if you have Istanbul installed, you could add Screencast this window to all [...]

By: Botan

Botan — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 03:09:46 +0000

In my own experience and those who are new to Ubuntu (and Metacity), the workspace options are almost instinctively ignored. The only reason I ever use the right click menu is to close the window. The workspace options are almost certainly a clutter in the menu, I am sure if some sort of testing were done on the most frequently used options, they would be very underused.

By: Niu Peng

Niu Peng — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 01:43:42 +0000

I like these:
Take a screenshot of this window
Share this window with another user using VNC
Screencast this window and upload it somewhere using Istanbul

By: Further thoughts on extending the window menu - …for the adult in you

Further thoughts on extending the window menu - …for the adult in you — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 01:07:24 +0000

[...] The previous post about extending the window menu caused a great deal of discussion. It would seem that our readers would be interested in an implementation. Thomas is considering working on this after the window matching experiments are more stable. [...]

By: qixcom

qixcom — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 18:31:56 +0000

I think that the taskbar and window frame menu need to be separated. I dont think that the minimize, unmaximize, close and resize options are very useful for the window frame menu but I find that the close and maximize options are useful for the taskbar so I wouldnt like to see it removed from there. Its useful on the taskbar if you have lots of apps open minimized and you want to close them quickly.
When they are maximized(window frame menu) though I find them redundant as there are already buttons available to achieve those functions when the window is in focus.
I wouldn’t like to see the always on top option removed as I use it frequently for college and personal work(extremely useful for gedit open on top of firefox for editing code).
I would like to see a the workspace entries cleaned up as others have pointed out.
Also the screencast/screenshot options would rock.
I think it would be great to have application centric options available through some sort of plugin system(maybe a plugin system or app per app basis and all apps too(so that you could later add a plugin which shares a window over something other than vnc, telepathy maybe available to all applications).

By: Mats Taraldsvik

Mats Taraldsvik — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 17:10:10 +0000

I have used Close, Move to workspace x a couple of times, but mostly I just use the keyboard shortcuts.

However, please, please don’t remove the Always on top-option. It is, in fact, the only of these options I absolutely depend upon when doing any work that requires more than one window to be open at once… and this option is needed for every window. :)

By: Emilio Pozuelo Monfort

Emilio Pozuelo Monfort — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 16:17:05 +0000

-1 for removing “always on top”. It makes no sense to add that per-application as that’s a window-manager thing really. It would be like adding “minimize” to every app out there. And I sometimes add it to a IM conversation, or to the music player lyrics window, or to random things. So saying it should be added on a case-by-case basis doesn’t really make sense to me, since there’s not a pattern to identify which windows should get them.

Nice discussion btw! I hope to see some of the proposed changes implemented sometime :)

By: antistress

antistress — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 15:25:35 +0000

the application-based menu items concept is interesting and remind me MS Internet Explorer 8 Accelerators http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/features/faster.aspx
Both are about saving time by displaying contextual actions = giving the user what he wants

It could be a second step in GNOME desktop after the MIME stuff which already allows to open the corresponding application by right clicking on a file (very convenient)

It could bring some more smartness

However
# Take a screenshot of this window
# Share this window with another user using VNC
# Screencast this window and upload it somewhere using Istanbul
all these seems to be cool especially for advanced user

By: stancil

stancil — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 13:21:35 +0000

+1 for application-based menu items. I want to be able to control minimized applications just by right-click on the taskbar.

Few Suggestions:

# Like suggested play pause etc in a media player
# Fetch emails and other email functions ( Thunderbird, evolution etc)
# Gnome Terminal -> ability to switch to another user