[Panel-devel] Pager extended for "viewports"

[Dirk Mueller]

On Thursday 21 September 2006 02:47, Timothée Lecomte wrote:

> Well, give a try to what I sent and tell me what you think.
> For the impatient, here is a screenshot with a desktop made of 8
> viewports in 2 rows:
> http://tipote.free.fr/compiz-pager-screenshot2.png

I have thought about this some more. For a correct viewport-simulating window 
manager support, we have to adjust a lot more. for example the various 
taskbar implementations either show all windows or all windows on the current 
desktop. Currently, with such a window manager, this setting is broken and 
doesn't do anything. Well, it still works like it is working technically, but 
for the user, it is perceived as broken. For the same way the current 
minipager was perceived as broken for the user - even though it did exactly 
what it was supposed to do. 

There might be a window manager out there, either now or in the future, that 
supports both desktops and viewports at the same time. What I'm thinking 
about: should we really bother the KDE user with the difference? Does he care 
if it is a viewport or a desktop? The funny thing is that the viewport 
implementation in compiz doesn't actually allow to scroll the viewport by an 
arbitrary amount - it only simulates a desktop tiled over it. The major 
difference is that the context menu has an option "move to left viewport, 
move to right viewport, move to above viewport, move to below viewport". Does 
the cube plugin in compiz support desktops above and below?

The more I think about it, the more I believe we should not bother the user 
with this difference. does the user really care if he moved the stuff to the 
desktop "above" or below? And if, can't we just simulate that like we do now 
with desktop implementation under kwin as well (by doing a two-row desktop 
layout)? Does the user care about if he moved it to desktop 1, viewport 2 or 
desktop 2 viewport 1? Why should he?

The moment we switch to viewports as children of desktops, the user is 
confused: the desktop labels are not applied to viewports, the documentation 
is all wrong, there are a lot of configuration settings in various 
applications to be duplicated (each desktop related setting has to be 
duplicated into a viewport related setting).  

> > This is one of the biggest reason for me hacking it as viewport ==
> > desktop into the minipager. This way at least some of the KDE settings
> > are kept as they were with kwin.
> Well, it's really limited to the desktop name, I don't think it's that
> critical: when you use it, you lose the real aspect ratio, which is
> quite nice to have in my opinion.

Well, it is certainly a setting some people use..


Dirk