GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 97491
file type information as window property for grouping
Last modified: 2018-01-24 13:19:35 UTC
I dont really think metacity is the correct place to file this bug, but it's the only way i know of that i can file a bug with the wm spec :) (maybe libwnck would have been better, but this will most definately need to be supported at the wm level) Grouping in the window list is sort of substandard from a usability perspective because it requires application association by the user. A better way to support this would be to group files by type. For example regardless of what text viewer i am viewing various text files with, they would all be grouped. This lets the user associate grouping with the type of files they are viewing, which is probably better/easier. As a fallback we could always group by application. I don't really know too much about the wm spec, so i'll leave the technical stuff to you. :) note: I've brought this up on the hig list and as a short term solution i think we could just specify that document based applications should set their app name to "grouped 'file type'" etc. This hack would probably work for the mean time.
Hmm, interesting idea but I can imagine people getting quite frustrated because their idea of grouping doesn't match ours... I think this would have to be an option at best, and we all know what Havoc thinks about those :) E.g. if I've got a plain text document open in OpenOffice Writer, should that be grouped with my open gedit documents? Probably yes. But what if it contains formatted text and/or pictures, is it still a plain text document? If I embed a spreadsheet into it, should it turn up grouped with any other spreadsheets I have open? If it contains only a picture, wouldn't it be better grouped with my open GIMP images? What if I Save it as HTML... does it then jump into my browser group...? And so on. Now, if we had a vfolder-like concept for mime-types based on the document's actual content ("this document is a combination of text, hyperlinks and a spreadsheet so it should show up in all those groups").... :)
I think we should just dup this on the libwnck bug for "group by class/name instead of by group leader window" and change that bug to "figure out how to group windows"
-- GitLab Migration Automatic Message -- This bug has been migrated to GNOME's GitLab instance and has been closed from further activity. You can subscribe and participate further through the new bug through this link to our GitLab instance: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libwnck/issues/19.