GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 302034
Don't open >1 windows for the same document
Last modified: 2014-08-12 09:25:04 UTC
If the same document is activated more than once, Evince shows new windows for the same document again and again. It would be better to pop up the existing window for that document onto the current workspace. This would be consistent with spatial nautilus too.
Evince is currently using different processes for different docs so this not possible. CCing Bryan for UI feedback
Why not? With some sort of IPC like bonobo_unique_application this could be easy.
>Why not? With some sort of IPC like bonobo_unique_application this could be easy. Yeah, if we change to use the same process for all the windows, that would be possible. That would introduce other issues though (like multi-head...), so I'm not sure it's worth for just this. One advantage would be that you could use something like gedit metadata.
Actually I believe nautilus currently brings you to the workspace where the window exists (which I think is wrong). It should bring the app to your workspace. I'd really recommend using D-BUS for this, it's kind of designed to do this sort of thing. Evince would simply implement the "org.gnome.Evince" or "org.gnome.DocumentViewer" service, that service would then launch the application windows. This is probably a good deal of work to implement... Basically you have the binary evince make command line argument conversions and D-BUS calls to the 'evince-service' binary which is already running or started at first call and implements the service. The service is aware of all instances of Evince running via D-BUS and if the document is not already open it launches a new process to handle the viewing of that document. See this diagram for how it works: http://dbus.freedesktop.org/doc/diagram.png
I do not think this feature is needed. Quite often I want to see two different pages of the same document in the same time and with this it would be not possible.
I've said before that I think adding a command line "--new-window" option that doesn't do this is more than fine. I believe there's a bug about this already. Many people who work on PDF/DVI and other document creation need this duplicate window feature. However they are comfortable with dealing with the command line and outside of that use case a single window is the preferred behavior in GNOME.
If you filter out an already opened document (and rise the existing window instead of displaying it a second time), having an MVC-wise "new view" command would be beneficial IMO.
Fixed in cvs, if dbus is installed
(In reply to comment #5) > I do not think this feature is needed. Quite often I want to see two different > pages of the same document in the same time and with this it would be not possible. +1 I'd prefer a setting that lets people configure this. I for one require multiple windows frequently. Now I know that I can use 'open a copy', but for a while I was left wondering why double clicking in nautilus or opening a new evince window and manually using "open" didn't work.