Reworking the kwin tabbox

[Martin Gräßlin]

Am Donnerstag 16 Juli 2009 21:49:24 schrieb Thomas Lübking:
> now my 2¢ on the whole suggestion:
> ------------
> imho there two different approaches to switch windows.
> - one is "on the fly" - which is good if you've got 2 up to 4 open windows,
> therefore the current concept is pretty much ok.
>
> - the other one is to find out of your window mess - basically the exposé
> approach
> the problem we face is top provide sth. like this (where window switching
> is a single task job) for an uncomposited environment
>
> -> (regarding the fulltime job switch)
> - whatever we do: not using the entire available screen is waste.
> (otherwise it would just be another taskbar :-(
>
> - the task is not bound to mouse or keyboard usage (i.e. you want to use
> both input devs)
>
> - as it's a fulltime job, there can (and should) be an explicit leave
> statement (clicking a window, pressing enter, etc.)
>
> - therefore there's no problem with a searchline either =D
>
> the key backdraw is that we cannot rely on compositing i.e. a miniversion
> of the window.
> all we have are title and icon and the icon is probably ambigious (right
> now i've got 5 kmail windows opened...) and the text (maybe ambigious as
> well) is a rather "slow" visualization :-(
>
> to improve this we could include the window geometries (or rather aspects)
> to draw some boxes and strip stuff like the app name from the displayed
> window titles (as they're implicated by the icons anyway) <advert>the
> bespin deco has such feature implemented ;-)</advert>
>
> Sidenote:
> ---
> imho a WM may take advantages from other running process but not rely with
> some core functionality on them (even if we assumed the "plasma/KDE only!"
> variant (what's pretty un-unix).
> what if krunner crashes, and a user who never uses it otherwise "magically"
> looses some functionality of his/her WM? s/he might search a whole day for
> the option to reactivate it :-(

thanks Thomas, your comment helped. So basically I agree that we cannot change 
the alt+tab behaviour, which has to be quick and has to be with alt key 
pressed.

So what we need is that fulltime job. And basically everything I proposed so 
far is for that fulltime job. And I think that could be done with a special 
KRunner interface (in that case it would be ok to use the "external" KRunner 
as it is not such an important core functionality like alt+tab).

And I agree that current size of the KRunner interface is a waste of space 
when going for such a switcher. So Plasma devs is it possible to get it bigger 
when we activate KRunner from KWin? I don't think it has to use the full 
width, but full height or a reasonable height to fit all windows in the 
selection would be nice.
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