kwin default window button order.

[Lubos Lunak]

On Thursday 15 of November 2007, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> hi all ...
>
> something that i've been wanting to see happen for a while is our window
> button order modified a bit. in particular, the defaults would be changed
> to "maximize, minimize, sticky, spacer*2, help, menu" on the left and
> "close" on the right.

 I might perhaps point out at this point that the Oxygen windecoration at this 
moment actually has a rather limited button list and doesn't have e.g. 
sticky.

> the reasons for this layout are:
>
> * close is a destructive action and should therefore be kept away from
> other buttons. we do this in our menus as well.

 But in the menu it's moved only a bit away, and it can be done for titlebar 
buttons as well (as seen e.g. in this openSUSE screenshot 
http://en.opensuse.org/Image:Screeny102_KDE_k3b.jpg).

> * the two most important buttons are close and either maximize or minimize
> depending on the user. so they should each have corner positions for easy
> mouse access. i put maximize as the left corner item because it benefits
> the most from this position between maximize and minimize: when maximized
> the window is guaranteed to have a corner position (well, barring panels,
> etc in the way) so maximize is probably the more likely action to benefit.
>
> * in our dialogs we put "go away" buttons on the right (e.g. Ok, Cancel)
> and action buttons to the left (Help, Defaults, etc). we usually put our
> clear buttons on the right in line edits, etc ... this brings the window
> decorations into line with this concept.

 These two may be easily outweighted by the annoying inconvenience of making 
it very different from other commonly used desktops (GNOME,MS Windows, KDE3). 
Probably very annoying, given how often these are used.

> attached is a patch that accomplishes this. the patch does four things:

 I like the patch.

> * it changes the defaults to the above

 With the exception of this item, unless there's stronger support for it. I'd 
personally prefer the using of spacers to separate the close button.

> this change is BIC, but SC.

 I have some BIC changes for this lib in the queue anyway.

-- 
Lubos Lunak
KDE developer
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