I'm developing a mod for grouping icons in the xfce tasklist plugin. Need feedback, please. :-)

[Rich Dennis]

I'm just a lurker on this list, but I would definitely use this.
Thanks.
amerigena


On Mon, Apr 21, 2014 at 3:04 PM, Debian Maverick
<debianmaverick at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi all,
> in nearly all the task/dockbars I've seen until now, when you select the
> option to "group" the icons that are different instances of the same
> program, the taskbar will give you a visual feedback of the fact that more
> apps of the same type are currently open. For example, let's say you have 3
> file manager windows open. In a taskbar that permits you to "group" the
> icons, you would see only a single icon for the file manager. When you
> click on this icon (or, sometimes, you only need to pass over it with the
> mouse) you will see a list of the 3 file manager windows.
> On the bar, usually, you see some visual feedback of the fact that more
> than one app of the same type is open. In the above example, on a Windows
> 7/8 os, you would see that the icons are graphically "stacked". On Unity
> and many other dockbars you will see some dots near the icon, etc.
> So, I was surprised when I found out that this common behaviour was not
> implemented in the default XFCE tasklist plugin... You can group the icons
> and disable the labels to make the panel similar to a Win7/8 taskbar, but
> the current plugin gives you no visual feedback for the grouping, and
> therefore you cannot distinguish "real" grouped icons from the not-grouped
> ones until you left-click on them, one by one... It's not very good...
> I know that one of the objectives of XFCE is to keep it small and light,
> but, hey, I cannot imagine how such a basic functionality could be
> resource-hungry or could impact performance!
>
> So, I downloaded the latest source code of the xfce4-panel (from ubuntu
> repositories), and I started to modify the code of the taskbar plugin
> myself to see if I could get what I wanted... So far I got the following
> result: http://oi60.tinypic.com/2jaf9yw.jpg
>
> As you can see, there is a nice little number on the bottom-right of the
> grouped icons, so that you can, at a glance:
> 1) distinguish between normal button icons (no little numbers) and grouped
> ones;
> 2) you can see immediately how many open instances there are for each
> application.
>
> The patch already works, but it's in an alpha development stage. There are
> various tests to do and I should add the related option in the properties
> of the panel, so that the user could easily choose between: labels without
> grouping, labels with grouping, no labels at all, no labels + number of
> grouped instances for each application (as in the above screenshot).
>
> I would like to know what you think of this mod, and if you would use it.
>
> P.S.: Thanks to the user cavalier on the irc channel #xfce-dev for the
> precious support he gave to me.
>
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>
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