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This is related to this thread I posted a while ago. Some posters in that thread mention activity grouping, but that's not what I mean. From my initial post:

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.

So the application (represented by its icon in the task switcher) is first in the hierarchy, not the individual windows. Because one can have a lot of windows open during a session and managing them without resorting to multiple virtual desktops can be quite hard. Currently if I open five instances of KMail the application is represented as five separate windows, when it would be more logical to have one instance represented in a task switcher/manager and the others as children of that instance instead of a seperate application. Offering such an option to select the application first and then select the appropriate window belonging to that application would be great I think.

Personally I find this annoying on the Mac. I often have many many browser windows open at once and they are not related to each other at all. If the alt - tab only selects one of the windows, then I have to do 2 actions to get the window I want.

1. Alt-tab to my application.
2. Choose the window I wanted via the top menu.

Instead of alt-tab to get my window.

I think that desktops should be document-centric rather than application-centric. It would make more sense for KWin to group applications which have documents open from the same folder or from matches in the folder. ie. If I have a folder called kde.org, which has a C++ file in it, and a Konqueror window pointing at www.kde.org. If I open the C++ file in KWrite then it could be grouped with the Konqueror window because they are likely to be related. Instead of just using the domain name to match, bookmarks could be placed in that folder which, when opened would group that document with anything else opened from that folder.

Tabbed windows already offer what you want, adding another level would mean upto 3 different actions to get to the particular document you want. Already we have the window manager being unable to tell when applications have tabs and separate them on the taskbar. Windows 7 does this with IE8.

I'm not so sure if the paradigm of "the less clicks the better" applies here. When I have 10+ windows open on KDE I have a hard time finding the correct one.

For example, when I'm looking for a specific text document in a mess of more than 10 windows I spend a lot of Alt+Tab cycles before I reach the right one when on KDE. Of course the application switcher shows the document name, but I don't want to scan every single instance in that list in order to get to the right document. On Mac OS X it's as simple as quickly CMD+Tabbing to the application icon and a second switch (CMD+~) between the windows, which switches between the actual windows instead of a thumbnail representation.

I agree the Mac way involves an extra action, but it actually takes longer for me on KDE than on Mac OS X. I'm not arguing for this behaviour to be the default, I can imagine it will annoy some people, but I would really like it to be an optional choice.

Grouping documents based on their origin is a very nice separate idea. A lot of Mac applications have this behaviour already and I would really like to see it in KDE as well.

Just a few notes: the MacOS window switcher implies you to know the application icon. That is in my opinion realy bad as it requires you to first learn the application icons. The name of the application is only shown when you have selected that icon.

KDE handles this part much better. We currently have five different solutions and each one is better:

• default (non-composited): a vertical list containing all windows with their icon and name
• Box-Switch: a horizontal list containing a live thumbnail of each window and the name of the selected application. Additional the selected window is highlighted. This effect is good if you know the visual appearance of your application. Bad if you have let's say ten open Konsole windows
• Cover-Switch: displays all windows, but only the selected as a big thumbnail. The windows reachable by alt+tab or alt+backtab are also good visible. This effect is good if you want to see all applications
• Flip-Switch: Shows all applications in the order you have to alt+tab. Good if you know how the window looks like. Can be really fast
• Present-Windows: shows a scaled thumbnail of each window including the application name. This effect probably the best usability for few windows, thumbnails could get too small if there are many windows (thumbnails are arranged in a regular grid).

So personally I think KDE offers a good selection for different use cases. Some of the switchers suck with many open windows, others are good for those.

I have some other(s) idea.

We should better integrate KWin with KLauncher. KWin should allows to have many client at once nonclient area. It can be handled by tab on window caption(like in some Compiz extension). We don't need compozite enabled to doing this thinks.

Idea is simple. When we run app by Dolphin(selecting file, example *.bmp), KWin enabling all Window of new app in a tab. We can now undock this Window by moving tab. Another idea is allowing KWin to group Window of the same app. There should be button on menu or keyboard combination(shortcut), to show all Window of this app cascaded.

Next idea is quite different. We should allows to filter window in window(task) list by application. There should be also option to show only windows from active application. Imagine somebody can have two task list: windows of the current application on top and all windows/application on bottom of screen.

Sorry for my English.
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First idea(about tabbing) probably won't work since we have apps like GIMP(normal gimp and gimp remote) or Firefox .

Lachu: you are mixing topics. This thread is about window/application switching.

Window tabbing is a different topic and the feature request for that is realy old and does not need this forum

Maybe you should consider taking the taskbar to another horizontal panel, where it's far easier to find the exact window that you want. Take a look to the top of my desktop (kde 3.5.x ):

http://www.postimage.org/aV18CS0A-9ed22 ... 77db52.png

I can launch easily 21 apps (24 with no width loss if i allow this panel to enlarge), having still space for displaying almost every time a "big" part of their title

Regards

Nooo. This is one of the things I highly dislike in Mac OS X.

To make KDE application centric, we need to change more than KWin in my opinion. The taskbar has already been mentioned, but there's more:
in Mac OS X, you don't quit an application by closing all windows - you have to chose Application -> Quit in the menubar (or Cmd-Q), if I remember correctly. How would this work in KDE? The global menubar is crucial here, since you can use the application (open new documents etc.) without any windows open.

I voted "no" because

• Changing KDE to application centric would need a lot of changes to how the Desktop Environment works as a whole.
• Just changing some parts (KWin, taskbar) to get something in between would just be confusing.
• I don't like the application centric approach to begin with. =P