Reworking the kwin tabbox

[Jacopo De Simoi]

On Friday 17 July 2009 10:32:32 Martin Gräßlin wrote:
> 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.
> 
Yes we can(tm)
However the (aestethical) problem I see with that is that with the filtering action of the queries, we would quiclky have far less results than "all results" so that the results view would be mostly empty as soon as the user looks for something. 
Since you can (and want) to filter your results I wouldn't see a problem in showing only a fraction of them to start with..