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It has become customary for applications supporting multiple documents to use a tabbed or MDI interface, taking document management away from the taskbar. The downside to this is that every such application implements its own flavour of multiple document management, with its own mode of presentation and means of switching documents. The other downside is that taskbars and other forms of task switching are being increasingly optimized towards handling only a small number of windows.

The fashion, derived I believe from OSX, that is visible in both KDE and Windows 7, is to provide two-level switching, where the taskbar groups multiple windows/instances of an application under one button and then provides a list of windows upon activation. Other trends, such as using window thumbnails for switching windows, don\'t lend themselves well to multiple similar windows either.

My idea is to take out graphical document switching out of applications and put it into the desktop environment by means of a space efficient taskbar, capable of handling tons of entries.

The inspiration for my idea was a Firefox extension, Tree Style Tab. I\'d very much like to see such a vertical, tree-structured application switcher on my plasma panel.


For single document applications, it could work using the same grouping mechanisms that current KDE taskbars use, except all the windows would be readily available as children of one node. That\'s the easy part.

For multiple document applications, there are two choices. Either we make a paradigm shift towards using a window for every document (yeah, right...), or provide a dbus API for publishing the list (or even tree) of documents an application process has open.
Running taskbars could listen for applications exporting this interface and display their document entries along regular windows on the taskbar. Such an interface would also need to provide methods the taskbar could call to switch documents in an application.
An additional advantage of this solution over simply managing separate windows, is that the application is aware of the relations between its documents, so you could perfectly reimplement the firefox extension using this mechanism.

I hope I described my idea in an understandable way. In closing I can only suggest those that haven\'t already, to try the firefox extension, for a first-hand experience of how it works.

A nice idea from the technical point of view, unfortunately this is simply not feasible. The solution will look strange until all applications are converted, and this won't happen before the day when Duke Nukem Forever is released (read: it won't ever happen).