GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 141171
Move all windows of an application to another desktop
Last modified: 2020-11-07 12:36:56 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.
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.
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.
(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.
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?
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).
also have to define "application" (window group, class name, whatever) and be sure this definition is synced with gtk and wm spec
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.
See also bug 120204.
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