Multiple Window Management

Unity badly needs better ways to deal with applications that have multiple windows open. Currently if you have a program with multiple windows open, and you click its icon on the dock it just brings every window to the front. This is terrible behaviour and would be downright overwelming for new users.

Some solutions could possibly be:

1. Reversing the currently default behavior. Currently single click brings all windows to the front. Double click brings up scale. Unity is supposed to be easy to use, new users would not know to double click, instead they will click and be assaulted with windows. IMO single click to bring up scale and double click to bring forward all windows would make more sense.

1. Windows 7-like thumbnails. Hovering over and/or clicking the icon could bring up thumnnails that you could click on to bring forward the desired window.

1. Slide-Down thumbnails. When you have multiple windows open there could be OSX-Like thumbnails in the launcher, but hidden until you click the app icon. For example you would click the application icon and if it has multiple windows open thumbnails for these would slide down from under the icon in the launcher. For this to be intuitive there would need to be an indicator on the dock icons that shows it has multiple windows open.

Also for the second two to work some of compiz's shortcomings would need to be fixed (Currently does not show thumbnails for minimzed windows)

Also scale needs some improvements: When you bring up scale there should be an X button on the top right of every window so you can close windows within scale (See: Gnome Shell)

Aren't 1 and 2 the same thing? When you single click it brings all the windows up, like a 'thumbnail'!

Agree scale should show minimized windows, and be super easy to find. I would like to see a target in the panel for compiz scale I use it way more than the dash! So people find it right off the bat.

I personally have scale on the scroll wheel button, and that is what made unity workable for me, made it possible to be productive now that the window list in the panel has gone missing.

macroshaft said: Aren't 1 and 2 the same thing? When you single click it brings all the windows up, like a 'thumbnail'!

1 would be scale, as opposed to 2's windows 7 style thumbnails.

screaminj3sus said: U1. Reversing the currently default behavior. Currently single click brings all windows to the front. Double click brings up scale. Unity is supposed to be easy to use, new users would not know to double click, instead they will click and be assaulted with windows. IMO single click to bring up scale and double click to bring forward all windows would make more sense.

A single click brings all of an applications windows to the forground if it has no windows in the foreground.

A single click gives you the scale view of an apps open windows if any of it's windows are in the foreground.

Even when you double click to get to the scale view because the application you want doesn't have any windows in the foreground, I'm pretty sure Unity still interprets it as two single clicks.

Later, Seeker

seeker5528 said: A single click brings all of an applications windows to the forground if it has no windows in the foreground.

A single click gives you the scale view of an apps open windows if any of it's windows are in the foreground. If you give users a quiz after living with Unity for a week, I wonder what percentage would have figured that logic out...

teachop said: If you give users a quiz after living with Unity for a week, I wonder what percentage would have figured that logic out...

Most who actually took any interest in noticing things

teachop said: If you give users a quiz after living with Unity for a week, I wonder what percentage would have figured that logic out...

Hard to say, I think a lot of users are probably in the 'don't know, don't care' category.

I think people that often have apps open with multiple windows will figure it out pretty quickly, whether it's multiple instances of an application or one MDI application like Gimp, for users that use multiple desktops it might also factor in whether their windows are more often on one desktop or spread across multiple desktops.

It took me longer than a week to figure out, but I can't really say how long it *would* have taken if I had waited until stuff was more feature complete and worked in a more reliable fashion before using it.

Later, Seeker