window management ideas

[Marco Martin]

On 7/10/09, Chani <chanika at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> so I had a crazy idea, and discussed it with lubos and notmart, and
> completely
> forgot to mention it at the bof. I brought it up again today and we ended up
> with some other ideas too.
>
> what I wanted is window tagging. instead of virtual desktops and tabs (tabs
> seems to be a workaround for window management not being good enough
> anyways) I could just have tags on windows, and have a taskbar that groups
> by
> tag, or have one virtual desktop per tag. perhaps some smart omission of
> superfluous tags.
> this could be done in stages: first the ability to manually tag, then
> session
> restore including tags, then virtual desktops automatically following tags
> (automatic creation and deletion of desktops would be nice, if done right),
> then magical automatic tagging from nepomuk (open a document, hte window
> gets
> the document's tags), perhaps other automatic tagging...

thinking about it perhaps newly created windows should have the tag of
the "currently showing" tag (will there be such a concept?) so it
could replace altogether the virtual desktop concept, not sure if
adding a new one will involve giving the window a tag by hmm, a
decoration window context menu or an ui in the desktop grid effect (or
possibly the sebas' columns thinghie)

> today I was told that wmii is a window manager that uses tags, so I need to
> go
> look into that.
>
> we also daydreamed about how nice it would be if you could save and load
> partial-sessions consisting of a group of windows and an activity.
>
>
> sebas had an idea for a new kwin effect to show all virtual desktops:
> instead
> of showing them as desktops, show them as groups of windows. as a
> side-effect
> this also avoids the issue of the taskbar showing the wrong stuff because
> the
> taskbar wouldn't be visible ;) he also wanted the ability to drag&drop
> windows
> between desktops from such effects.

it would probably better cope with tags (having each column with a
different tag name and maybe just show ones with a least one window)
it would decouple it from the pager so two pagers with different
settings would mess up a bit less (or can we have something different
from a pager? maybe just a tag list?, i really despised the tiny
window previews)

>
> in hte short term, I think we should add some simple features to make the
> current virtual-desktop management more convenient:
> -an "add virtual desktop" action in the pager contextmenu
> -maybe a way to add/remove them from the desktop grid effect? (yes, I'm
> thinking about gnome here)
> -errr... I really should've written notes, because i forgot the rest. :)
>
> comments?
>
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