Middle clicking top panel should push maximized window to background

[kyleabaker]

Now that it is possible in Unity to drag maximized windows down to restore them, it should also be possible to arrange them using the middle click mouse button on the top panel to push maximized windows to the background.

This feature has been present in Ubuntu for a long time already, but the introduction of Unity and the changes its brought have left a small gap here.

Middle clicks to the top panel when it is displaying information for a window that is not maximized should be ignored (since the user can middle click in the windows title bar instead), or maybe just push a maximized window that is already below the focused window even further back.

[Kyle Clarke (kyleclarke)]

Not a duplicate, but please note that portions of this bug relate to https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/661049 .

"Mark Shuttleworth wrote on 2011-01-06: #8

I confirm that the unused (non-menu, non-indicator) space should behave
as a proxy for the titlebar, BUT implementation is up to the Unity team."

This basically means that the panel (less the menu portion) will act exactly as a window title bar should act in the maximise state.

[Tom Jaeger (thjaeger)]

There is really no reason to restrict this behavior to maximized windows. I've created a branch that lifts these restrictions:

https://code.launchpad.net/~thjaeger/unity/panel-lower-raise

This makes it possible to cycle through all windows on the current Desktop by repeatedly middle clicking on the panel. This makes me miss the task bar a little bit less.

[Colin Law (colin-law)]

+1 for this to apply to all windows, not just maximised. Then one can repeatedly click the top panel, without moving the mouse, to cycle through all windows. This is much better than having to move the mouse to each title bar one at a time. It would also seem to satisfy Mark Shuttleworth's comment above:
"I confirm that the unused (non-menu, non-indicator) space should behave as a proxy for the titlebar"

[Colin Law (colin-law)]

Middle click on top panel is not working for me on unity-2d (it appears to do nothing). Is this covered by a separate bug or should this one be extended to include unity-2d?