Hard to switch between windows grouped by an icon

[Rami Al-Rfou']

Binary package hint: gnome-do

When user have three windows of an application, (s)he will have two bright dots below the application icon.
Now, if you want to switch between these three windows, you have to right click then choose the window. According to bug 382705 this is not easy.

What I suggest that the left click on a grouped windows icon must switch between them. If you think that the left click is used to bring the windows to top when they are behind other windows, then use the right click and for running a new instance of the application use the middle click instead of showing the pop up menu

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Mon Aug 10 00:43:38 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
Package: gnome-do 0.8.1.3+dfsg-1
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-5.24-generic
SourcePackage: gnome-do
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-5-generic i686

[Robert Dyer (psybers)]

You can use the mouse scroll wheel on the icon to switch between them. Thus, this bug is invalid.

See bug 319805 for more details.

[Alex Launi (alexlauni)]

you can scroll over the icon to switch between windows

[Rami Al-Rfou' (rmyeid)]

What about using a laptop, how should I switch between windows in an easy way ?

[Alex Launi (alexlauni)]

Use the scroll on your trackpad, that's what the rest of us Do

--
-- Alex Launi

[Robert Dyer (psybers)]

Every laptop I've seen and/or used in the last 5 yrs has a scroll capability. Usually the right side of the touchpad acts as a scroll area. On macs you use 2 fingers anywhere to scroll. Basically this functionality is in place, we won't be adding new code to support older machines incapable of scrolling (go buy a USB mouse for $10 that has a scroll wheel and plug it in if its a huge deal).

[Chris Halse Rogers (raof)]

On Sun, 2009-08-09 at 23:32 +0000, Robert Dyer wrote:
> Every laptop I've seen and/or used in the last 5 yrs has a scroll
> capability. Usually the right side of the touchpad acts as a scroll
> area. On macs you use 2 fingers anywhere to scroll. Basically this
> functionality is in place, we won't be adding new code to support older
> machines incapable of scrolling (go buy a USB mouse for $10 that has a
> scroll wheel and plug it in if its a huge deal).
>

You obviously haven't seen a Lenovo laptop recently. Mine has no
scrollwheel.

IIRC there was a bug suggesting that simply left-clicking on the icon
would first raise all the windows associated, and then cycle through the
windows?

[Rami Al-Rfou' (rmyeid)]

I have thinkpad R61, I disabled the touchpad because it is annoying and not as efficient as the trackpad.
I see that you are not convinced by the need to change the behaviour of switching windows to make it easier.
I suggest that you add an option so people who feel do not comfort with current situation can choose another solution like the ones I mentioned or mentioned by Chris in comment 7.

[Robert Dyer (psybers)]

Left clicking should raise/focus, left clicking again should minimize. That will not change.

My Lenovo is obviously superior to yours, Chris. :-)

So to summarize, the default behavior will not change. We also will not put in some sort of gconf hack to support alternative behaviors because that will unnecessarily complicate our codebase for only a handful of users.

[cometdog (ericctharley)]

Another possible alternative "solution":

Right now I have compiz set to show window previews when I hover over buttons in the taskbar. This also works in gnome-do, but when there are multilple windows grouped under the same icon, it only shows one of them.

Would there be any way to set up gnome do such that it showed previews of all the grouped windows at once when you hover over the icon? Then if you could simply mouse up to one of the previews / thumbnails and click on it to bring that window to the front, it would be excellent. I think it would address all of the concerns expressed here.

I do think the scrolling feature is very cool; but I've been using gnome-do for a while and I had no idea it was even there until reading this just now. The previews would be easily discoverable and very convenient. And you could keep the existing scrolling functionality.

(Also -- I believe any thinkpad should be configurable to scroll with the middle button and the trackpoint, or with the touchpad, or both. In any case this is possible to achieve on Ubuntu. You may have to do a bit of googling.)