taskbar: onlyGroupWhenFull

[Sebastian Kügler]

On Thursday 30 October 2008 22:13:56 Zack Rusin wrote:
> > I admit that I didn't talked to sufficiently many people about this to
> > achieve a reliable statistical data but I can say that every single
> > person I asked disables this feature as soon as he installs his new DE.
>
> This is how my panel looks without grouping:
> http://ktown.kde.org/~zrusin/panel.png
> and this is only showing tasks from the current desktop. 

Mine looked much worse before the grouping entered the tasks applet.

> I have to click on
> each and every item in the taskbar to find anything. While I'm certainly a
> very special kind of user, your argument for pointlessness of grouping
> tasks is obviously bogus.

From my personal point of view, the grouping in the taskbar is a godsend.

I'm using the "all windows in taskbar" approach, and with more than 8 windows 
open (which is almost always the case here, I usually have 15 - 20 windows 
open). The grouping and row support makes the difference between "label 
unreadable" and "label easily recognisable" to me, using the taskbar with 
those additional means to create space on makes it much less distracting as I 
don't have to actively search for the window I want to bring to the front.
The middle-click to group and ungroup works very smoothly.

But why default behaviour? Simply because it doesn't get in the way for most 
of  the users. When you actually look at users, they'll fall into two 
categories: those with up to four windows open, and those with more than 10 
windows open (say powerusers). In both cases (at reasonable resolution) the 
taskbar will not obscure access to windows, it groups them as it becomes 
necessary. 

People who really want it to behave exactly linear can change that setting 
easily. But by default, we should prevent the taskbar from becoming 
unreadable, which is essentially what this feature does.

In the future, we could maybe make the grouping depending on the current 
activity and group windows that aren't in the current activity, or on a 
different virtual desktop ...
-- 
sebas

 http://www.kde.org | http://vizZzion.org |  GPG Key ID: 9119 0EF9 

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