No way to sort open windows of an open application

Bug #856894 reported by Benjamin Drung
30
This bug affects 5 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Ayatana Design
New
Undecided
Unassigned
Unity
Incomplete
Low
Unassigned
unity (Ubuntu)
Incomplete
Low
Unassigned

Bug Description

In GNOME 2 I was able to open a bunch of LibreOffice presentations and sort them chronologically in the panel. In Unity all LibreOffice presentations are hidden behind one LibreOffice Impress icon. There is no way to sort the presentations. There is no easy way to find the next presentation except searching all of them for the correct name. This is a regression for my use case.

Revision history for this message
Omer Akram (om26er) wrote :

Ben, do you have any suggestions for how this case be dealt.

Revision history for this message
Benjamin Drung (bdrung) wrote :

Sadly, no. I couldn't imagine how to deal with this use case in Unity.

Revision history for this message
Omer Akram (om26er) wrote :

I am marking unity bug as incomplete as we wait for design feedback on this bug. Its a valid issue but the way we handle unity bugs is we set the status to incomplete till we get input from design.

Changed in unity:
status: New → Incomplete
Changed in unity (Ubuntu):
status: New → Incomplete
Revision history for this message
Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote :

There are plans to activate type filter in the expose, that would allow you to find the correct one by typing part of the name, not sure that's enough to solve your usecase though

Changed in unity (Ubuntu):
importance: Undecided → Low
Changed in unity:
importance: Undecided → Low
Revision history for this message
Neal McBurnett (nealmcb) wrote :

Thanks, Sebastien. Can you point to more info on how a type filter would work, so we can continue to engage?

Revision history for this message
Jan Rathmann (kaiserclaudius) wrote :

Two ideas come to my mind that would greatly improve that usecase:
- Make the expose view show the windows in the chronological order in which they were opened (currently not the case). Furthermore the possibility to manually sort windows in the expose view by dragging them would be great.
- Show the window titles above every window in the expose view.
( - Show a close button for every window in the expose view. Is a bit offtopic for this report, but would also be very useful.)

Without features like these, having e.g. multiples images opened in Gimp is rather annoying IMHO.

Kind regards,
Jan

Revision history for this message
John Lea (johnlea) wrote :

When development of the spread is complete, the ordering of the windows in the spread will be spacial. When there are two or more windows with the *exact* same location, these windows will be ordered relative to each other by time opened.

While is is not a direct solution for your request, if all your presentation windows are maximised, they will always be ordered in the order in which they were opened.

Revision history for this message
Benjamin Drung (bdrung) wrote :

One idea came to my mind: Add the list of window titles to the right click menu of the Unity launcher. Then I can right click on that icon and select the window by the file name (which equals the window title). This would be faster than searching thumbnails for the right presentation.

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