Workspace switcher should show up on Window overview.

[Adam Nagy]

I think it would improve the user experience a lot. Also i'm not a fan of dragging small icons. It would be consistent to just pull the windows to another workspace from window overview.

[Jaap Broekhuizen (jaapz-b)]

How exactly do you want this to work?

[Sergey "Shnatsel" Davidoff (shnatsel)]

Rule 34 of elementary: There’s a blueprint about it, no exceptions.
Rule 46 of elementary: There is a bug report about it that duplicates the blueprint.

[Sergey "Shnatsel" Davidoff (shnatsel)]

Here's the blueprint: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/gala/+spec/combine-workspace-switcher-and-scale

[seanh (seanh)]

I think this is a good idea. Basically when you hit ctrl+w both the window overview and the workspace switcher should appear at once, instead of having two separate modes.

- As Adam says you would be able to drag the (larger) windows from the window overview down onto a workspace in the workspace switcher, instead of having to drag the tiny icons in the workspace switcher. (The tiny icons could still be draggable though, as these move all of an app's windows from a workspace instead of one window at a time.)

- You would be able to drag individual windows to workspaces, not just entire apps

- Sometimes I hit Win+w because I want to change to some app, then I realise that the app is actually on another workspace, so I have to hit escape and then hit Win+s. With window overview and workspace overview in one, this wouldn't happen

- You could take three keyboard shortcuts (Win+w, Win+s and Win+a) and reduce them to one. Less keyboard shortcuts to learn and remember. But even once I know the three keyboard shortcuts by heart, it's still significantly easier if I don't have to think, before acting, do I want to overview windows on this workspace? Overview all windows? Overview workspaces? Or launch a new app? It's a lot nicer to always just hit one keyboard shortcut without thinking about it, and be able to do whatever you want (this is a really nice thing about Gnome Shell, for example)

- With the one overview mode instead of three, you can add a single icon to the plank to launch the overview with the mouse. Now it can be launched with a mouse-click, not just with a keyboard shortcut or hot corner, and it's more discoverable (the elementary app launcher already has both of these advantages)

I think the youtube video in the blueprint that Sergey linked to does a good job of showing how it could work. (For dragging windows to workspaces see about 1:30 in the video)

I've made a couple of other feature requests related to this:

The plank should always be shown and should be usable when the combined window/workspace overview is active, so I can launch apps from the plank when in the overview:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/gala/+bug/1166313
https://bugs.launchpad.net/gala/+bug/1166312

Windows should be grouped by app: https://bugs.launchpad.net/gala/+bug/1168666

By the way, are launchpad bugs the right place to make feature requests like this? Or is somewhere else preferred?

[seanh (seanh)]

Also related, make Slingshot and WingPanel work as normal when in the combined window/workspace overview mode: https://bugs.launchpad.net/gala/+bug/1168672

Basically make it one mode where I can overview and manage everything: windows, workspace, launching apps