GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 361796
Clicking on desktop should minimise all opened windows
Last modified: 2010-10-14 22:54:00 UTC
Make all opened windows minimised when user clicks on desktop space. Other information:
I think double-click would be more appropiate, because it's more intentional than just one simple click. It would be good to know what usability-list thinks about it...
Created attachment 113386 [details] [review] Work in progress patch This patch hooks in the nautilus machinery to execute some action when user double clicks on background space of Desktop, what is left is to make the wnck call to minimise all opened windows.
Created attachment 114659 [details] [review] Final patch This is the final patch, works as expected, please try it. I'd rather preferred a dbus call to libwnck, instead of linking to it, but they dont offer dbus services..
Created attachment 114660 [details] [review] Final patch corrected Just to adjust a non modified line in the patch.
I think this is a very creative idea, but it is somewhat hidden and obscure unless we advertize it. Therefore, I am a bit skeptical that we link against a new library just for pulling in this feature. Couldn't this be implemented on window manager level, by handling double clicks to the root window that are not handled by Nautilus? We'd have to return FALSE in the "button-press-event" handlers for unhandled clicks to make that happen, though - otherwise we'd "eat" all the button presses.
There is no reason the window manager has to know about this problem. If Nautilus wants to minimise all windows when you double-click on the desktop, it should use the existing EWMH methods to do so by sending messages to the root window (if you want a list of what needs doing there, I'll provide one). Then not only will only one program need to be changed, but also it will work with far more WMs. (Please don't say "root window" to mean desktop!)
I don't think nautilus should interfere with window management this way, and it seems to me that with 3.0 we're trying to shift the file manager away from desktop managing, rather than the opposite (and with gnome-shell you already have a fast switch to the overview with just one click anyway). For these reasons, I am closing this as WONTFIX.