GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 694210
window thumbnails: drop grid alignment
Last modified: 2013-02-19 23:44:55 UTC
Right now we arrange the window thumbnails in a grid if there are more than two rows of them. This was originally intended to reduce the amount of noise in the thumbnail arrangement. It also made sense when the thumbnails were of a similar size. Nowadays we reflect the size of windows in the size of the thumbnail. This leads to huge amounts of space between some windows when they are grid aligned. Removing the grid alignment would also lead to larger thumbnails. I think we should try and drop the grid layout before 3.8.
Created attachment 236829 [details] patch Here's an experimental patch from Jasper. We can use it for testing.
Created attachment 236845 [details] [review] workspace: Don't use grid layout Right now we arrange the window thumbnails in a grid if there are more than two rows of them. This was originally intended to reduce the amount of noise in the thumbnail arrangement. It also made sense when the thumbnails were of a similar size. Nowadays we reflect the size of windows in the size of the thumbnail. This leads to huge amounts of space between some windows when they are grid aligned. Removing the grid alignment would also lead to larger thumbnails.
Review of attachment 236845 [details] [review]: Still needs a designer ACK, but this is more like the patch that I would have written. There's still leftover cruft (LayoutStrategy base class, extra things that can be calculated) of course, but that's follow-up stuff. Marking Reviewed -- treat as ACN after the design team says they want it, and I'll write some follow-up patches after 3.8 release.
I am for this change. The varying aspect ratio of the window thumbnails makes the grid alignment matter of luck and it seems to just create random amounts of whitespace. I am for a more compact view for the window arrangement.
Attachment 236845 [details] pushed as 4b3c9e8 - workspace: Don't use grid layout