Dragging and dropping windows and a standard application/x-wnck-window-id ?

[Dylan McCall]

I am about to throw together a little hack for Metacity which would
allow someone to drag and drop a window - as in X's dnd protocol - by
grabbing its menu icon / emblem. This would correspond to dragging a
window from workspace to workspace via libwnck's task list applet. I
think that type of functionality could enable some neat avenues for
window management which we don't have right now since this way the user
can clearly select a window and, in a sense, place it in another
application. Right now the user is limited to simply moving it around
within the window manager.

Possibilities, in order of likelihood:

      * Intuitive link between items on the window list applet and the
        windows they reflect. (Some day let's make these the same
        thing...)
      * Drag a window into a dock to "iconify" it.
      * Drag a window into a black hole applet which does essentially
        the same thing as xkill.
      * Drag a window into a chat window to send a screenshot or to open
        a remote desktop session showing / giving control over that
        window.
      * Drag a window so that the receiving application can determine
        other information that can be gathered from it, such as content
        (eg: document or person) that the window represents. Maybe a
        step closer to that still attractive window experiments mockup
        by the tango folks. (I like to think of application windows in
        terms of object oriented programming, where an open document in
        an editor is really just a descendent object with multiple
        inheritance going on. Even if the thought does make people
        shudder and go completely contrary to the fact that a window is
        still just a window... and it's sadly not that simple).


So... stuff:

Is the potential for upsetting the universe too great for this to be
bothered with? I realize such a change changes the window menu to only
respond when the mouse is released (or only with a right click). How
significant would the issue be?

For drag and drop of windows, I am hoping for maximum compatibility. A
quick look around tells me there isn't much to be compatible with. Am I
right in assuming, then, that application/x-wnck-window-id is the
closest to a standard MIME type we have for this stuff?


Bye,
-Dylan


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[Wouter Bolsterlee-3]

2009-02-06 klockan 04:53 skrev Dylan McCall:
> Is the potential for upsetting the universe too great for this to be
> bothered with? I realize such a change changes the window menu to only
> respond when the mouse is released (or only with a right click). How
> significant would the issue be?

It removes the possibility to press the mouse button, move the cursor, and
release the mouse button on the menu item you want. This single-click menu
interaction is very useful and I use it all the time.

However, this also works for right-click, so if you leave that as-is, no
functionality is lost. The right-button-press-move-release approach is
actually even more powerful: it works on the whole title bar (instead of
just the window icon), and on the whole window if Alt is pressed.

    — Wouter


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