GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 151183
"move to another workspace" submenu should not appear when there's only 2 workspaces
Last modified: 2006-02-20 02:15:35 UTC
Currently, the menu looks like this: Put on All Workspaces Move to Workspace Right Move to Another Workspace Left (1) Right (2) I prefer to have only two workspaces because I find with more than that, I just get my environment all cluttered up -- it's a distraction. Having two to flip between is great. However, there's no reason for the menu to have that extra suboption in this case.
Interesting point. Though theoretically you can rename your workspaces, in which case removing the submenu would make it so the actual workspace names don't appear anywhere in the UI, unless you set an option for the pager. In your case, you seem to have actually named your workspaces Left and Right, giving perhaps the mistaken impression that the names that appear in the main manu are actually the real names of the workspaces. This is incorrect; the names that appear there are always the direction of the workspace, so if your workspaces are names foo and bar, it would still show up as "Move to Workspace Left" and "Move to Workspace Right".
Rob, I'm not so concerned about that -- if you only have two workspaces, their names are drastically less important. And in fact, if you only have two, they might as well be named Left and Right, which is why I changed the names of mine. Sorry for the confusion.
Note that if anybody decides to write a patch, there should be a patch against libwnck as well, since it suffers from the same issue.
This has also been reported in Debian at http://bugs.debian.org/319649 by Bill Denney.
Created attachment 49648 [details] [review] Proposed patch After applying the attached patch, the menu will only be created for more than 2 workspaces. I wonder whether we should take into account the numbers of cols/rows also, i.e. whether we only should create the menu if the number of workspace columns or rows is > 2 and we don't have 3 workspaces in 2 rows/cols (because then the actions won't be sufficient). But on the other hand, it could be confusing to not have this menu in some non-obvious cases. Note that libwnck uses a different menu layout and always creates a "move to workspace" submenu.
It'd be really nice if we could get some way to keep the libwnck and metacity windows in sync... (and it'd also be really nice to replace all the existing "move to another workspace" menu entries with previews as mocked up in bug 145281). Anyway, I think the one-liner patch is simple enough and ought to be able to go in after we branch--which should probably be within the next week or so. Of course, we'll have to ping Havoc first. If we don't get back to this bug in more than a couple weeks, someone please ping us. :)
Just looked again; why not disable the workspaces stuff the same way we do for when there is only 1 workspace at the very beginning of meta_window_menu_new() ? I think that'd be better.
Created attachment 59545 [details] [review] Patch to turn off the workspace list when there are only two workspaces Here's a patch which turns off only the workspace menu when there are exactly two workspaces. (Thanks to my seven-year-old daughter Rio for help with testing. We'll make a GNOME hacker of her yet.)
Looks good to me. The freeze would probably break ui freeze and although I'm sure we could get approval, I don't think it's worth the headache. So, add a ChangeLog entry and I'll commit on head and not the gnome-2-14 branch. Thanks.
Cool. Thanks all.
Okay, here's an entry: 2006-02-19 Thomas Thurman <thomas thurman org uk> Removed "move to another workspace" menu when there are exactly two workspaces. Fixes #151183. * src/menu.c (meta_window_menu_new): clear META_MENU_OP_WORKSPACES bit when n_workspaces==2
Committed, thanks.