GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 86390
Make icons in the tab-popup selectable by using the mouse
Last modified: 2020-11-07 12:36:30 UTC
It would be very convenient if one could select icons from the tab-popup window by using the mouse. Especially, if you have a lot of windows open, alt-tabbing to the right icon can become rather cumbersome compared to simply pointing at it with the mouse. Suggested scenario: 1) press (and hold) alt-tab, making the popup appear. 2) left-click an icon from the popup 3) expected result: identical to tabbing to that icon and releasing the alt-tab. Regards, Raymond.
What's the advantage over doing it the way we solved it? After having pressed Alt+tab it's really no pain to hold alt and press tab again (you can even assign one button if you want to change it faster). At the moment I just see a big disadvantage: It bloats the code because we's have to handle mouse-clicks. see you, Chris
IMHO, such feature would improve usability. The current way works fine when you have a small number of icons in the tab popup. However, I often have 10 or more icons in it. Tabbing to the icon can become cumbersome, because it often happens (to me at least) that I accidentally tab past the icon. I know, there you can tab backwards too, but the point is, if you have lots of icons, simply selecting the proper one, instead of repeatedly hitting the same key to get there, is faster and hence more usable. For comparison: I don't know if you're an emacs person, but I always switch to a specific buffer by "C-x b". I could use "C-x C-b", and then "tab" to the proper buffer, but that involves repeatedly hitting some key until I get there. Last but not least, I think I got used to having tab-popup icons clickable by using a Windows machine.
Seems like a reasonable feature.
Batch adding GNOME2 keyword to Metacity bugs. Sorry for the spam.
One question: if you're using the mouse to select the window anyway, why don't you just use the mouse to select the window?
marking low for now
isn't this what the "window list" applet [list of windows on bottom panel by default] is for? It would also double on the "window selector" applet. These 2 solutions can both be done solely by the mouse instead of both mouse and keyboard, which seems more optimal to me. I would say this is both unnecessary and a bad idea.
*** Bug 300621 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
The reason that this enchancement would not be needlessly duplicating the window list or bottom panel is because the purpose of this proposed enchancement is to handle the situation where you press Alt-Tab and only then realise that there are a heck of a lot of icons to Tab through to get to the one you want. Yes, you could at that point abandon the Alt-Tab, go to the Window List and select the window there, but much slicker would be the ability to just click on the one you want.
*** Bug 303792 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 310508 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Is this feature still being evaluated (after 3 years and half a dozen dupes), or are we waiting for someone to write the actual code?
It's just waiting for someone to write a patch.
Though I should note that contrary to one comment in here, the tab-popup in windows is NOT clickable. Clicking anywhere causes it to simply disappear.
*** Bug 322612 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 557137 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I agree with Window Selector can do this functionality. To improve the usability I think that could assign a keyboard shortcut.
@Elyézer: How would the keyboard shortcut work?
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.