GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 771804
[auto-move-windows] Automatically remove preceding empty workspaces
Last modified: 2017-11-25 02:25:06 UTC
I propose that when the first workspace is empty, it should be automatically removed and all the existing workspaces shifted up -- the same behavior as the last workspace when the second to last workspace is emptied. The reason for this is that if I select a window on the first workspace and move it to the workspace above, it will create a new workspace above and shift the other workspaces down. The problem is, if I then close that window or move it back down, the first workspace persists. If I have a lot of open windows, I now need to individually move all the windows back up a workspace to restore my original layout. Two similar-scope alternatives that I like less are to disallow creating workspaces at the top in this way or to add a way to manually delete a workspace. --- Slightly larger scope: The way I think about dynamic workspaces, the absolute position doesn't matter; the invariant is the position of workspaces relative to one another. Instead of the current "jump to workspace X" shortcut, it would be much more useful if one workspace were marked as the primary workspace and then set all the "jump to" commands were relative to its location. That's relevant to this issue because then the behavior above would change to be, "If the top workspace is empty and above the primary workpace, remove it." This would fix my issue while preserving functionality like [auto-move windows](https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/16/auto-move-windows/).
(In reply to Stephen Michel from comment #0) > The problem is, if I then close that window or move it back down, the first > workspace persists. Yes, workspaces persist until you switch to a different one. We used to remove workspaces immediately when they became empty (including the first one), but this turned out to be rather confusing, so we changed it (see commit 2631f03). I think neither changing back to the previous behavior nor treating the first workspace specially makes sense here ... > If I have a lot of open windows, I now need to individually move all the > windows back up a workspace to restore my original layout. No, you just need to switch down one workspace.
Empty workspaces except those at the end were persisting forever for me. Turns out this was caused by an extension, my apologies.
Created attachment 336082 [details] Start
Created attachment 336083 [details] move_up.png
Created attachment 336084 [details] move_back_down.png
The extension was auto-move windows; turns out here is the place to report enhancements for it so I'll re-open this. I added some screenshots to show the behavior. To be clear, I like the persistence of empty workspaces between other workspaces, because I auto-move email and other communications to a specific workspace, and have a hotkey to jump to that workspace (which breaks after everything is shifted by one).
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