GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 163135
Windowlist should "minimize" buttons for minimized windows
Last modified: 2005-01-08 14:28:14 UTC
For minimized windows the Window List Applet just fades the icon a bit and puts brackets around the window name. This is not only very subtle, it actually defeats the purpose of minimizing windows (cleaning up the workspace to be able to concentrate on the actual used windows). Suggestion: Make it so that the Window List buttons of minimized windows are also minimized by displaying only the icon (and not the title) of the window then. This would help in more than one way. First, you could tell apart minimized and not minimized windows much easier. Second, cleaning up the screen by minimizing currently unimportant windows would also clean up the Window List, since the windows not minimized have more space now on the List. Third, it would comply to Fitt's law since it'd be easier to hit an un-minimized window (which has a much wider button then) than a minimized window. After all you minimize a window only when you don't plan to use it for some time, so minimizing it's button on the Window List seems just The Right Thing to do, HIG-wise. I think the popularity of panel applets is due the fact that an applet is the only way to have a window/app easy accessible without having it permanently block a full slot in the Window List. Being able to minimize a window and have it's button in the Window List shrink to the icon would be a major relief here. I think it could be a good idea to implement this, either as an option or even as default behaviour.
Your whole argument hinges on the assumption that the window list will be used predominantly for un-minimized windows. That sounds totally counterintuitive to me, because the _only_ thing I use the window list for is to recover minimized windows. For those, your proposal: (1) makes it harder to tell the windows apart when you want to recover one, and (2) it violates Fitt's Law by making the unminimized window you're trying to select as small as possible. This seems odd to me, especially considering bug 84411. I'll mark this as a duplicate of bug 91655 ("Figure out how minimized windows should be marked vs. normal windows") and mention your request specifically, as well as add a comment to bug 81222 ("Figure out the common usage modes") about your request. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 91655 ***
Actually, I think I forgot something. I think I do use the window list occasionally to raise an active yet totally obscured window. However, I do predominantly use it for minimized windows.
Fun anecdote: When Ximian GNOME 1.4 came out we allowed people to select from a number of different panel layouts. One of the panel layouts was intended to look like CDE. Since CDE doesn't use a windowlist (but instead iconizes to the desktop) we didn't include a windowlist at all. Some of the first bug reports that came in showed that whole companies were using the CDE layout and that people were losing windows whenever they minimized them. (We had to make a FAQ pointing out Alt-TAB and issue an update soon after.)