[Panel-devel] Patch: sort taskbar entries by position in kmenu

[Fred Schaettgen]

On Wednesday, 8. June 2005 03:10, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On Tuesday 07 June 2005 04:43, Fred Schaettgen wrote:
> > ... what I tried is to sort taskbar items in the order
> > in which they appear in the kmenu. The idea is that we don't just group
> > _equal_ applications, but also _similar_ applications.
...
>
> this breaks down easily and quickly. right now i have an OpenOffice submenu
> at the top of my k menu. Office is much further below. System and Utilities
> are gobbledy gook collections. not that it would matter much because i (and
> probably most people) don't tend to have too many of the same "kind" of app
> open at once.

It's probably your decision that openoffice and office are so far apart. If 
not, the I really hope that the kmenu won't degenerate the same way as the 
windows start menu, where the first menu level are mostly company names.
You're right, usually people don't run different flavours of applications at 
the same time. But it also puts different applications of the same group to 
similar places when they are run at different times. 
Of course if all depends on the kmenu having a reasonable layout and not 
"favorite apps", "utils", "misc" ;)

> the taskbar code is snaky (and slow) enough as it is. i'd rather go the
> other direction, actually, if possible. fix the bugs that are there and
> straighten it out.

It's only expensive the first time an application is started, the rest of the 
time it's just a map access more. But these things add up over time, that's 
true. 
Which one is the "other direction"? Strict sorting by application name? Or 
keep the current append-to-right behaviour if it's the first instance?
The former is better as long as the sort key is visible or known otherwise, 
the latter isn't stable over sessions, but preserves the "new apps are on the 
right"-property partly.

Fred

-- 
Fred Schaettgen
kde.sch at ttgen.net