GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 691083
Show close buttons on windows permanently in overview.
Last modified: 2013-04-01 21:05:39 UTC
It's a bit tricky to hover the window, and then close it. I don't understand the rationale of not showing close buttons, they still able to disappear if I drag some window. I tried it even on 800x600 resolution and it seems the close buttons does not take that much space. Nor it just mouse problem, it's also a touchscreen problem. So accessibility suck at these. And just a little write on accidental closing: if you try to click on top right pixels of the window when close button is not appeared you still close the window.
The rationale (I assume) is that it is less visual noise on screen. Basically, there is less UI to distract you from the window thumbnails. The trickiness you are probably referring to is the rather short distance you need to be from the thumbnail before the close button is displayed. This could be fixed by extending the active area of the thumbnail (although I'm not sure how easy that would be). But yes, the point about touch screens stands. The idea of showing the close buttons on all windows has been around for a while for that very reason (see bug 664995). The reason it hasn't been done yet is that there aren't really any tablets running GNOME 3 right now, but it seems like the logical solution to the problem.
I don't usually comment on design issues but this idea strikes me as really really bad. FWIW, I don't even like the current implementation and here's why: it's easy to hit one of these close buttons and close an application inadvertently without an easy way to undo that action. A touch screen would make this even worse and having close buttons by default on all thumbnails even more so. Figuratively, using the overview in a touch screen with all those close buttons would be like walking on a minefield IMHO.
Created attachment 232660 [details] Maybe there must be some drag and drop way to close window like that. So if the close buttons are so dangerous: Here is the video by gotbletu talking about that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=ALCUPp-5UwE#t=178s The idea of closing by middle click is really good by me, because it is not tricky to focus whole thumbnail by mouse and click middle mouse button as it is with current tiny button.
Again, that is the question to designers)
Created attachment 232661 [details] Container mockup with correct symbolic icon and 1px border.
Created attachment 232666 [details] Here is my personal use theme not using close button. You can play around with this extension: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/352/middle-click-to-close-in-overview/ My theme just sets close button size to 0px using background color #000, but that is good solution to me. No accidental closing jet. That's solved my problem fully.
Long press to show the close button ?
This bug seems as a duplicate of #668490 I'm continuing the discussion at https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=668490#c4
Duplicate as per comment #8. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 668490 ***