Why do people minimize windows?

Posted Feb 23, 2011 22:11 UTC (Wed) by tjc (guest, #137)
Parent article: GNOME Shell 2.91.90 released

Owen's analysis of "Why do people minimize windows?" is incomplete. I minimize windows because I have my window manager set up to remove them from the alt-tab cycle when they are minimized, which makes alt-tab more useful.

I use alt-tab because I am often forced to use OS X, and OS X has no convenient means to lower windows. (It has Expose, which, at least to me, doesn't qualify as convenient). So I have this alt-tab thing in my brain, and I drag it over to Linux, which is basically what anyone working in a multi-platform environment does; if not with alt-tab, then with something else.

I could live without a minimize button if were to be replaced with a "depth gadget." In fact, I would be willing to trade both minimize and maximize for a depth button. The inability to control the stacking order of windows is the biggest shortcoming of most GUIs in current use. You can always lower a window that's in the way, but you can't raise a window that's entirely obscured. Alt-tab, cascading windows placement, Apple Expose--and to some extent minimize--are all attempts to work around this problem

Why do people minimize windows?

Posted Feb 23, 2011 22:41 UTC (Wed) by beagnach (guest, #32987) [Link] (3 responses)

what window manager? and how do you remove minimized windows from the alt-tab cycle? especially useful if the info is for xfce or gnome

Why do people minimize windows?

Posted Feb 23, 2011 23:03 UTC (Wed) by sorpigal (guest, #36106) [Link]

E16 includes the checkbox "Include iconified windows in focus list" and has had an option for this forever.

Additionally, in E16 the iconbox is optional. If you turn it off, too, then this means is that "iconified" is "completely invisible" until you open the desktop window list (which I find useful for drastically removing distractions).

Why do people minimize windows?

Posted Feb 24, 2011 16:23 UTC (Thu) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link]

> what window manager?

Sawfish

Why do people minimize windows?

Posted Feb 25, 2011 13:30 UTC (Fri) by dag- (guest, #30207) [Link]

Is this possible with metacity too ? It looks very useful.

Why do people minimize windows?

Posted Feb 23, 2011 23:26 UTC (Wed) by sorpigal (guest, #36106) [Link]

I don't really worry much about depth as such, since I don't do overlapping windows on the same desktop very much. An exception is when I'm using the GIMP, in which case I run in to this problem all the time. If a WM could provide a better way (in addition to but not instead of the current ways) to make sets of windows visible and invisible, that would help a little.

For the GIMP I'd like a way to make the floating palette windows appear under my mouse when I want them, then disappear when I don't. Alt+Tab switching them to in front of my image window(s) and then clicking the image window to "send the palette away" is my current best solution, but it's really not ideal. I've considered adding a "lower one" button to my title bars, but the problem of bringing them back remains. (You can have a LOT of GIMP palettes and image windows in your Alt+Tab window focus list.) I'd like a way to temporarily make the focused window be not there, like for 2 seconds, to give me time to raise a window that was behind it, then have it reappear stacked below the window I just raised.

When doing image manipulation it is a truism that you cannot have too much screen space, so keeping toolboxes always visible is just irrelevant. I'm sure this is true for other generally-full-screen activity. There has to be a better way to manage floating, overlapping windows when you have to have them all on one workspace. I don't think the Gnome Shell approach is a very good answer partially because it's very disruptive for a trivial window focus swap type operation. It seems to have been designed more for task switching than focus switching.