GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 746145
Shaded windows vanish
Last modified: 2015-03-13 17:33:12 UTC
Problem: Having upgraded to Fedora 21 (Mutter 3.14.3) I have found that window shading no longer works. I have set windows to shade when the title bar is double clicked - now when I double click the title bar they completely vanish instead of shading. Additionally, the overview just shows a big empty space in place of the shaded window, rather than the window itself. Further background: I am having serious problems using Gnome now that all of the proper mechanisms for hiding a window have been removed, and I am unsure how the Gnome designers are intending my workflow to be changed to accommodate this design. My work tasks have a lot of commonality between them, and therefore when switching between tasks I frequently need to keep some of the windows visible. For example, I need my Empathy and FireFox windows available for most (although not all) tasks. This makes using a separate workspace for each task unrealistic, since I would need to manually move over all the common windows when switching tasks. Leaving all of the windows displayed on the same desktop all of the time leads to distracting clutter and it is much harder to find the windows associated with the current task. Gnome does have some minimisation functionality, but there is no separate list of minimised windows anywhere. This means that, for example, where I have five terminals open, with one of them minimised, to unminimise it I need to go to the overview and click the one that was minimised. Terminal windows all look very similar when shrunk to fit in the overview and figuring out which one is the minimised one is almost impossible. Additionally, the position of each window in the overview changes dynamically, so I can't even remember which one it it by location. My preferred method of hiding unused windows in the past has been to shade them. The primary advantage of this for me over minimising is that the window stays where I put it and I can therefore remember which window is which from its position rather than having to identify it from it's (scaled down) contents. The secondary advantage of shading is that it is faster to just double click a shaded window rather than have to go into overview mode. Summary: As well as fixing this bug, I hope that someone can advise me as to what the designed workflow is intended to be, given the information above.
Created attachment 299314 [details] [review] window-x11: Fix height computation of shaded windows Since commit 6e06648f7, we start out with the invisible frame parts only, and then add the unconstrained rect's height (which consists of the visible parts of both frame and client window) *unless* the window is shaded. While we indeed don't want to add the client height in that case, we need to explicitly include the visible frame parts now.
Review of attachment 299314 [details] [review]: they still show up bugged in the overview but that needs fixing in a different place, lgtm
(In reply to Steve Hill from comment #0) > As well as fixing this bug, I hope that someone can advise me as to what the > designed workflow is intended to be, given the information above. I don't think there's a designed workflow but I can tell you mine: I learned to ignore my OCD about "window clutter" and just switch between windows with Alt+Tab. I don't use workspaces either, just keep everything stacked together, but I guess workspaces might be a good fit for you to split your activities if you can't ignore "window clutter".
Attachment 299314 [details] pushed as 67a30b7 - window-x11: Fix height computation of shaded windows
Many thanks for this - I've applied the patch to the stock Fedora package and can confirm it fixes shading in the desktop view. Can I suggest leaving the bug open since the overview display is still a bit broken? WRT your comments on workflow: Workspaces don't work for me because there is too much commonality between my tasks - I would be manually moving common windows between workspaces all the time. I don't think I have OCD about "window clutter", I just find it hard to actually find the windows I'm currently working on when there are a lot of unnecessary windows cluttering the desktop. This is especially true for terminal windows (which I usually have a lot of) since they are quite visually similar. I've also realised the other thing I use shading for: quickly getting to a window that is completely covered by another (I could use overview mode for this, but for some reason it seems easier to just temporarily shade the obscuring window).
(In reply to Steve Hill from comment #5) > Can I suggest leaving the bug open since the overview display is still a bit > broken? That would be bug 602379, no?
Oops, you're absolutely right - sorry.