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

[Debian Maverick]

Thanks to you for the feedback. :-)


2014-04-22 0:38 GMT+02:00 Rich Dennis <amerigena at gmail.com>:

> 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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>> xubuntu-devel at lists.ubuntu.com
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>>
>>
>
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