5

Hello!

I just discovered how great and flexible the task manager's grouping feature is. I am actually very impressed with the manual grouping feature, which I discovered reading this blog post:

http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/3864

In the end of his post, the author lists some possible improvements to the current system, which I quote and comment here, as I tend to agree with his points

* Left-click a group should react like left clicking a single task - minimise or restore all tasks.

Actually, there could be a setting to accomodate this and the current behavior. After all, this is KDE and we love settings, don't we?

* Double-click to do an inline rename on the group item. Probably that should be consistent with the configured setting for double-click on a window title bar instead, so Alt-double-click would continue the 'Alt means groups' theme.

I think the group's icon should be also settable (is that a word?). Currently, a manually created group's icon is a boring default-x-application one. I think that groups of windows of the same application should have that application's icon (this is the default behavior for the "group by program name" setting, but not for the "group manually" setting). For groups of different applications, the user should be able to choose the icon of one of the applications from a list, or a different icon altogether, using the default KDE icon selector widget.

* Session managed groups. Yes, since suspend to ram became reliable I hardly logout any more, but a monthly Leave, Logout to get the latest KDE point release is conceivable. And I want my session back. I'm beginning to feel like a spoiled brat here.

I completely agree. Especially the "spoiled brat" thing. Another spoiled brat here .

* The same groupings in the Alt-tab switcher.

Actually, this could be a little controversial. See this thread for a discussion on a similar matter. I really don't know what would be best here.

* Semantic activity goodness. I want to be able to define my activities desktop wide. And then assign everything that matters to them, task groups, panel layouts, notification intrusiveness. You don't want to interrupt me with an IM while I'm packaging kdepim4 for openSUSE, I might slip and exclude all the Kontact plugins from the RPM.

Actually, I didn't really understand this one :-$.

I think that these improvements would be really helpful for activity management. I am particularly interested in the "click once to restore/minimize" all tasks thing. That would save me a lot of clicks during work time

Anyway, thanks to the devs for this great piece of software KDE 4 is truly rockin'.