Most likely the title of this thread doesn't convey what I'm trying to explain, but it'll have to do.

Coming from Mac OS X and having used XFCE, GNOME and now KDE 4, there is still one thing that is lacking for me in all of the aforementioned three FLOSS desktop environments; an application centric approach similar to OS X. What I mean is this, in Mac OS X windows are grouped by their application. So if you invoke the switcher by CMD+Tab (to bring up the equivalent of "Cover switch" in KDE 4) you see application icons in OS X, as opposed to the actual windows in GNOME, KDE, XFCE, etc. - and Windows being the prime example of course.
Highlighting an application in the switcher will bring the all the relevant application windows to the front and the user is able to switch through all these windows by hitting CMD+~. The application is always the parent and its windows the children, as opposed to the currently implemented reverse way of ordering.

What I would like to see is the same way of window management in KDE - it would eliminate the need for a taskbar/manager. Does anybody know if it's currently possible or being worked on, or does it go against the philosophy of KDE?

That would need to be implemented in KWin, and I am not aware of any plans to implement this. However "task grouping" will be added into Plasma for KDE 4.2 so you will get something that should be able to emulate it ( depending on how flexible this grouping is )

Just a contrary thought. I have been using OSX for a couple of years now and find this "feature" of really difficult to cope with. This is because I often have a few windows open for the *same application* and what I really want to do is switch between those windows. OSX doesn't provide a simple way to do that. I end up using expose for all my task switching. Fortunately expose is a *fantastic* task switching paradigm.

For me the new activity based switching that is emerging as a future KDE feature sounds more interesting than retro-porting this feature. Heck, you might even be able to emulate the effect you are after using it... maybe...

Task grouping sounds promising I hope I'll be able to tinker with it some time soon. I'm not sure there will be Debian backport releases for KDE 4.2 betas.

Exposé is indeed a very good task switching paradigm and something I've used extensively in OS X, but not so much in KDE. Switching between windows grouped under its parent application is indeed not possible in a visual way, but you can use CMD+~ to switch.

I do hope this gets implemented in some way (maybe task grouping is the answer), but I reckon it would be quite some overhaul. But it would be very clean to have just one instance of Kate open, for example, showing multiple sessions in different windows. The way it's handled now you have to start Kate twice to get two separate sessions (the same goes for other applications) which leads to a lot of clutter in the task manager.

Is this feature still going to happen? I am running 4.7 but I can't seem to figure out a way to do this?

This is possible in master, as far as I know it'll show up in 4.9: https://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/104025/

Hans wrote:This is possible in master, as far as I know it'll show up in 4.9: https://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/104025/

Nice. I'll suck it up until then Thanks!