GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 452350
Sort by workspace, then by launch time.
Last modified: 2007-11-10 15:20:25 UTC
This is a new bug that will regroup some other bugs about sort order. One issue with changing the sort order is that it'll probably break the reordering that can be done with drag and drop. So far, people have requested: + alphabetical order (comment in bug 133496) + most recent windows order (bug 349230) + applications order (bug 433623)
*** Bug 349230 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 433623 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Most recent windows order (which I once suggested too) is a bad idea: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52225#c17 Alphabetical ordering would also be bad given that windows can and do change their title dynamically (at which point the issues referenced in 52225#17 come into affect, but magnified in that tasklist buttons are randomly reordering without necessarily even having any user interaction that could be connected to it). Also, people hated the old (prior to the fix in bug 52225) sorting order. Havoc's comments about it (from http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52225#c4): It's currently sorted in an arbitrary but fixed order, the only feature of the current order is that windows in the same app appear next to each other, and the order does not change over time. 'app' in Havoc's wording probably meant 'process ID' rather than 'executable name' (as I believe 433623 was asking about), though single-instance apps blurs the distinction. Obviously, sorting by app requires a secondary sort, and perhaps if you picked a better secondary sort than the original algorithm had then it wouldn't be so bad. You're doing most the work these days, so feel free to ignore/override me. My $0.02 just aligns with Havoc's, though (also from 52225#4): I don't think it should be an option, it should just be whatever user-tests best, or whatever Windows does, or some other reasonable default. To make it an option we'd need evidence that for some subset of users the default is significantly problematic or less good than an alternative.
Bug 342696 was about sorting by workspaces first. It's a bit like the window selector :-)
Sorting by workspace then by launch time also received feedback from usability experts a number of years ago (and they liked the idea); see bug 52225 comment 8, bug 52225 comment 9, and bug 86185 comment 2. Based on that usability feedback (and my other comments here), I'm going to mark this as a duplicate of bug 52225. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 52225 ***