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Bug 141171 - Move all windows of an application to another desktop
Move all windows of an application to another desktop
Status: RESOLVED OBSOLETE
Product: metacity
Classification: Other
Component: general
unspecified
Other Linux
: Normal enhancement
: ---
Assigned To: Metacity maintainers list
Metacity maintainers list
Depends on:
Blocks: 155458
 
 
Reported: 2004-04-26 22:02 UTC by Carlos Rodrigues
Modified: 2020-11-07 12:36 UTC
See Also:
GNOME target: ---
GNOME version: ---



Description Carlos Rodrigues 2004-04-26 22:02:57 UTC
There is a feature that I would really like to see in metacity, the possibility
of sending all of the windows of a particular application to another virtual
desktop. For instance, sending all of Gimp's windows to another desktop at once.
Comment 1 Rob Adams 2004-04-27 21:21:09 UTC
Seems reasonable.  The UI is the hard part.  I'm not sure that there's a good
way to handle the UI for this.  Perhaps the best place would be in the panel
window list context menu.
Comment 2 Carlos Rodrigues 2004-04-27 21:49:05 UTC
Or the window menu, in a similar way to the current "Move to n" items. The
problem  is this would double the number of "Move to n" items, perhaps a submenu
labeled "Move All Windows of This Application to..." (apropriately shortened of
course). To mantain UI consistency, the current items could move to a submenu
named "Move to Workspace..." or "Move Window to..." (with the submenu items
being "Workspace n").
I'm thinking submenus because I really can't see another way as efficient as the
current single window thing.
Comment 3 Elijah Newren 2004-04-27 23:12:21 UTC
(Note that I haven't thought this through thoroughly but figured it couldn't
hurt to throw out an idea)

Is move-to-another-desktop the only operation that would be useful to perform on
all windows of an application?  Just a random idea, but it may also be useful to
provide a minimize-all, move-all, close-all, lower-all, or some other operation
on all windows in an app.  If so, an alternative strategy that may work (or may
just be overengineering for a small usage case) is coming up with UI for
selecting all windows in an app and some kind of visual feedback to show that
they're selected, with a corresponding method deselect the group after
operations have been performed.
Comment 4 Rob Adams 2004-04-27 23:36:11 UTC
Perhaps if you hold down Alt or something the window menu morphs to convert all
the operations to operate on all windows in the group?
Comment 5 Carlos Rodrigues 2004-04-28 00:17:29 UTC
Something like the alt key (or that otherwise useless context menu key :)) is a
good idea but also a rather obscure one. I would rather have that and some kind
of item on the menu (a boolean item) to modify the other items to operate on all
windows.

Well, a boolean item seems a bit cumbersome, forcing the user to select it every
time (until learning the alt thing) but you get the idea (somethin visible to
the user).
Comment 6 Havoc Pennington 2004-04-28 18:15:23 UTC
also have to define "application" (window group, class name, whatever) and be
sure this definition is synced with gtk and wm spec
Comment 7 Carlos Rodrigues 2004-04-28 23:40:50 UTC
From my perspective (the user's perspective), I see to ways to define
"application" in this feature's context:

1. "Move all gnome-terminal windows" - All windows of an application and their
open dialogs are moved, regardless of the particular instance they belong to.
This is useful when one is throwing all the xterms to one workspace, all of the
emacs windows to another, etc.

2. "Move this GIMP instance's windows" - All windows of a particular instance of
an application and their open dialogs are moved. This is useful when one has
more than one open instance of an application and wants to separate them between
different workspaces.

I guess having both options would lead to excess options in the UI with little
benefit, so my preference goes to option 1. because when talking about MDI
applications (those that fit option 2.) there is not much point in having
multiple instances.
Comment 8 Elijah Newren 2004-10-14 22:57:42 UTC
See also bug 120204.
Comment 9 André Klapper 2020-11-07 12:36:56 UTC
bugzilla.gnome.org is being replaced by gitlab.gnome.org. We are closing all
old feature requests in Bugzilla which have not seen updates for many years.

If you still use metacity and if you are still requesting this feature in a currently supported version of GNOME (currently that would be 3.38), then please feel free to report it at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/metacity/-/issues/

Thank you for reporting this issue and we are sorry it could not be implemented.