multi-screen management

[todd rme]

On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 4:24 PM, Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo at kde.org> wrote:
> On Wednesday, August 18, 2010, Chani wrote:
>> On August 18, 2010 10:05:22 Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
>> 1) user unplugs their external monitor and takes their laptop home. at home
>> they remember there was a note on the other monitor that they need to read,
>> so they open up the manager tool, swap the containments, read the note,
>> then swap back.
>>
>> 2) user wants their laptop screen's containment to stay where it is, but
>> something in the multiscreen stack keeps telling plasma to move it to the
>> external monitor. user uses this tool to swap containments every time they
>> connect or disconnect the screen [how realistic is this?]
>
> unfortunately, rather realistic *sigh*
>
> ok .. so given that these are use cases ... how about this as an idea:
>
> in the Activity Manager panel, if there is more than one containment in the
> current activity, it is shown expanded with a snapshot of each containment.
> so, in a two screen system, the current activity would be represented by two
> screenshots next to each other instead of the one icon. click on one or the
> other would switch the current screen to be using that containment.
>
> this doesn't touch the "bring that containment from Activity 1 over to
> Activity 3" issue, but that seems like more of an edge case, one that is
> harder to solve nicely and which probably requires a whole big "arrange stuff
> around" tool like in your proposal.
>
> if we just try and solve the above 2 use cases, though, we could perhaps do it
> right from inside the existing activity manager UI. thoughts?

But this just gets us back to the problem we had before, which is that
the desktop containment does not handle resizing very well.  I was
under the impression the whole point of the way we do it now was to
avoid this problem.  It would be great if we could switch containments
around like this, but only if the problems with resizing are fixed.
Otherwise we are just back where we started.

-Todd