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More playful than anything else;

If a user "shakes" a window, any other grouped windows will separate until no more windows are left in the group. A small amount of kinetic energy might be applied to the new windows, if possible.

Something like Aero Shake in Windows 7, only better? Some earlier comments here on the forums on implementing Aero Shake-like features in Kwin suggest it would be hard to implement.

In this case, how does Kwin know whether to do this shaking action or simply move the group across the screen?

Perhaps it would detect that the window overlaps a certain point a number of times, such as 4 or 5, all within a certain period of time of each other, and acts on that. Don't know how well that would work, or even if it's feasible, but...

Unlike Aero shake, this would be a very natural gesture (shaking things in nature doesn't hide other things, but shaking a stack of, lets say cards, would throw them all around)

so, this is +1 from me.

--
A bit off-topic:

The general problem with these things is that we should first make a plan which actions we want to have accessible via gestures like this (and/or multi-touch) and then devise which gestures best serve them.

It could be problematic introducing one-by-one since an action that is introduced later could be better suited for some gesture that was already assigned to an existing action.

For an example, let's say we made a window snap to a border of the screen when you move it to that border. And later, we decide that we want to close a window when we throw it away - drag it offscreen - that is drag it to the edge of the screen since we can't actually drag something out. And we are getting a collision with the previous 'snapping' action.

Hope I wasn't too confusing.

ivan wrote:For an example, let's say we made a window snap to a border of the screen when you move it to that border. And later, we decide that we want to close a window when we throw it away - drag it offscreen - that is drag it to the edge of the screen since we can't actually drag something out. And we are getting a collision with the previous 'snapping' action.

Hope I wasn't too confusing.

Yes, in this example, this has become configurable in the Screen Edges configuration section, since you can't have both drag across desktops and screen-edge-snapping activated at the same time. I can see the problem though.

ivan wrote:
A bit off-topic:

The general problem with these things is that we should first make a plan which actions we want to have accessible via gestures like this (and/or multi-touch) and then devise which gestures best serve them.

It could be problematic introducing one-by-one since an action that is introduced later could be better suited for some gesture that was already assigned to an existing action.

For an example, let's say we made a window snap to a border of the screen when you move it to that border. And later, we decide that we want to close a window when we throw it away - drag it offscreen - that is drag it to the edge of the screen since we can't actually drag something out. And we are getting a collision with the previous 'snapping' action.

Hope I wasn't too confusing.

+1, Anything where anything is centralised for config/usability should be a decent priority or have a plan.

Angel Blue01 wrote:Something like Aero Shake in Windows 7, only better? Some earlier comments here on the forums on implementing Aero Shake-like features in Kwin suggest it would be hard to implement.

In this case, how does Kwin know whether to do this shaking action or simply move the group across the screen?

Caution: technical thinking:
It could be an angular equation, the computer would record the last several points where your cursor changed its movement vector significantly (+- 5 degrees maybe?); If your cursor changed angles sharply, it's a zig-zag, if it was shallow angles, but the angles repeat, it's a circular motion.
/Caution

This falls in with what Ivan said; And made me think;

What if we had some sort of "dragging gestures"; For example, if a window was moved in a circle several times, we could rotate the window 90 degrees, if we zig-zagged we would register a "shake", and we could decide the actions for these gestures through the options. This is almost for another idea though.

Marked as submitted: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=247315