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

[Fred Schaettgen]

On Wednesday, 8. June 2005 18:26, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On Wednesday 08 June 2005 03:45, Fred Schaettgen wrote:
...
> > 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?
>
> strict sorting by application name would be my current preference. though
> i'm happy to be disuaded from that preference =)

I don't know which one is better myself. I just wanted to bring up an idea and 
the code needed to try it.

> on the other hand ... we could start thinking more visionary like and say:
> "applications should advertise what kind of service they provide so we can
> manage them by context."
>
> this devolves into:
>
>  o how do applications advertise this (window manager hints per window?
> what do those hints look like?)

It would be enough if each application could be reliably identified. No need 
to specify more than that directly as window manager hints imho - if the 
hints don't need to be dynamic.
Obviously the contents of WM_CLASS and the name or filename of the 
corresponding desktop file match often, but not always. I don't know if they 
are supposed to match. But the StartupWMClass attribute in the desktop file 
spec suggestes that the answer is "no". 

Being able to make a connection between window and desktop file would give us 
a couple of possibilities, like a "Add to panel" action for taskbar items, 
"edit shortcut" in the window menu or similar.

>  o how do we define the "kinds of service" so we don't get "image renderer"
> and "pixel pusher" from two image editting apps and thereby devolving into
> a sea of babel

Hmm, how about looking it up in the menu structure? ;) Then we don't have to 
solve the same problem twice.

>  o what sort of "manage by context" behaviours would we like to introduce?

- We could leave the answer to this to others and just provide an interface to 
plug in actions into the taskbar context menu. But those actions could be 
only per-application, not per instance/per window, unless the applications 
publish their dcop id or if it is used for KUniqueApps only. In that case we 
could register actions with a desktop file for applications just like we do 
for mimetypes. But more than that is needed to make the menus dynamic.
Uh, wasn't that discussed in the Systray II-thread already? A custom context 
menu for taskbar items? Did you decide if and how to do that already?

- KUniqueApplications could be removed from the panel while they are running

- Drag and drop from taskbar to panel

> for 3.5 let's restore the "by name" ordering and for 4.0 let's get
> visionary. what do you think?

sure, that's fine.

Fred

-- 
Fred Schaettgen
kde.sch at ttgen.net