KDE-Forum.org

Hey all,

My name is Ryan and I have a few interesting ideas for the new KDE. Most of what I have been thinking about has to do with visual presentation of desktop elements and probably goes under the heading of "window manager stuff."

My main idea is really just a set of windowing behaviors for dealing with multiple programs or windows as a group. For simplicity I will refer to this idea as "constellations." The idea is this that the user can treat a group of running programs/windows as a single object in order to ease the use of switching back and forth and also to keep the main applications separate from other unrelated windows. This might make use of some of the composite window effects that have been developed recently. As a simple example, a web developer could create a constellation icon for his/her desktop, which would launch a set of five applications automatically with a single click.

This personalized constellation could then be expressed visually on screen as mini window images (using composite) that sort into a pentagonal or circular arrangement (this could eventually be a set of options.) The idea here is to add a logical arrangement to specific groups of windows such that (a) specific window(s) could be brought up with a keystroke, the application changed sequentially with a keystroke and potentially constellation views changed with a keystroke.

Back to our developer, who, for testing purposes launches 3 constellations containing multiple versions of several popular web browsers. This type of scenario is where constellation windowing behavior is most important. Instead of 12-15 applications to deal with, the developer has only 4 meta-objects that can control all of the main and child windows for all of the processes associated with each specific constellation. This would mean that the five development tools that this developer uses the most are always accessible by a pre-defined keystroke combination and every additional constellation would be help to segregate other groups of applications so that they are logically arranged as well.

Constellations could be made to help identify applications that have died from large groups of windows (good for testing purposes) by logical numbering within a constellation, and also could help display information about the application processes themselves (like pids, cpu use, mem use, etc), as well as basic point and click process control (SIGTERM this process, etc.)

Well that is the general idea, please let me know what you think!

-ryan