Option for thumbnails at the overview bottom

[jcmonteiro]

Description

This is an attempt to solve #64.

Listed below are what I believe should be/have been done to solve this issue:

• Place the ThumbnailsSlider element at the bottom of the overview.
• Add an option for this in the preferences window.
• Adjust the width and overall layout of the box containing the thumbnails when they are at the bottom. The upper corners should be round instead of the ones on the left.
• Make the thumbnails slide down instead of right when they are at the bottom.

Additional Info

I am capturing the overlay-key (typically WindowsKey), which display the overview of windows and workspaces, and changing the thumbnails position if the user has selected this option in the preferences window. I tried to

let bt_switcher = this.addBoolean(_("Place the overview workspace switcher at the bottom?"),
    KEY_PLACE_SWITCHER_BOTTOM);
bt_switcher.connect('state-set', Lang.bind(this, function(widget, flag_state) {
    Me.imports.extension.overrideSwitcherPlacement(flag_state);
});

But that did not work out. Is it because the preferences window runs in another thread?

[zakkak]

Great job @jcmonteiro . Do you prefer keeping this PR open till all of the boxes are checked? Or gradually merge it?

PS: Not sure about your question. I believe by overriding some methods and styles we could get away without hijacking any keys.

[jcmonteiro]

@zakkak I believe we could gradually merge it. But the following should be taken care first.

When the grid has at least 3 columns, it slides to the right and almost exits the screen when the mouse pointer leaves the thumbnails area. Is this expected? If it is, it should be modified to slide down when the thumbnails are at the bottom and should depend on the number of rows, not columns. Take a look at these pictures (more comments on this and on your PS note after the pictures).

Another comment on this. When the thumbnails hide, it is no longer possible to drag and drop windows from the current workspace preview to them. Should I move this to an issue?

Regarding your PS, I totally agree, but I'll have to do some digging into what should/could be overridden. I'm not much of a js programmer, especially for gnome-shell.

[mateosss]

Any updates on this PR? It would be pretty awesome.

[jcmonteiro]

@mateosss, for now you could checkout to overview-thumbnails on my forked repo and test it out. I haven't had the time to keep working on this.

[goodwillcoding]

@jcmonteiro ... I checked out your overview-thumbnails from your fork and it does not seem to be working at all? Is there something specific that needs to be done to trigger it?

[jcmonteiro]

@goodwillcoding That is strange. Just tried your setup and it is working fine for me (both on Debian 9 "Stretch" and Ubuntu 18.04 "Bionic Beaver"). Sometimes you need to log out for the changes to take effect. Other than that, make sure the original workspace-grid extension is not in ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/, since it would cause conflicts.

[goodwillcoding]

@jcmonteiro The extension is correct one and loads fine as indicted by the "Place the workspace switcher at the bottom" but it definately is not working. I am on Ubuntu 18.04. I also tried disabling every other extension just to make sure. and it is not working. Maybe you have some magical commits in your local checkout that have not made it in?

[jcmonteiro]

No local commits, everything is working (at least as described above) as is. Just tested on two friends' computers. What exactly do you mean by not working? What happens or doesn't happen?

[mrmoss]

I'm on Arch, and this isn't working for me either. I see the option in the settings menu, but the thumbnail viewer isn't moved, just in the default location with the default size/behavior. I double checked the git logs just to make sure I had the right branch/version of the code.

I'm guessing it's the same behavior that @goodwillcoding is seeing?

[sanwablo]

Could there also be the option to show the workspace overview on the left and on the top?

I personally would prefer it on the left, as the pointer is on that side of the screen after launching activities with the mouse. I use a simple 2x2 layout.

[brianjmurrell]

@jcmonteiro

for now you could checkout to overview-thumbnails on my forked repo and test it out. I haven't had the time to keep working on this.

This isn't working for me on GNOME 3.28 also. I do have the additional option when I open the extension configuration tool but the overviews don't appear on the bottom of my screen when I enable that. I even restarted the shell and still not change.

Seems to be working now.

[brianjmurrell]

What's needed (other than a rebase on 3.30) to merge this?

[zakkak]

#67 (comment)

[brianjmurrell]

When the grid has at least 3 columns

My grid is 3x1 (3 wide, 1 high). I don't seem to experience any of what the previous comment describes.

Is it still reproducible and therefore still holding up landing this?

[prasannavl]

Alternatively, would be nice if there's an option to just list all of the workspace items vertically in a linear fashion.

I prefer horizontal workspaces. Without this set of commit, my world is spinning in a bit of agony. But since it doesn't fit Gnome's design, everything seems hacky -- one simple way to deal with this without ending up breaking in future releases, would be to just fit into gnome's design (which is vertical) - just display all workspace items in them vertically linearized no matter the grid size or orientation.

To be honest, most of the time, I couldn't care less its displayed in the activities overview vertically on the side edges, or horizontally on the bottom-top edges -- just need a nice list to reorganize them that doesn't look preposterous -- which is what happens with a grid with both vertical and horizontal when you're not on a large widescreen.

I think both vertical and horizontal grids should only be enabled on large screen displays, and small screens should default to linearized views of the grid. (Having an option to choose how (vertical/horizontal/side/top/bottom, etc) would be nice, but probably isn't all that a deal break)

[mrmoss]

Here's a crazy idea: What if the background of the workspaces in overview was transparent, set to 100% fill (minus search bar), and the per window previews were disabled? This would simply present the thumbnails of each desktop, which you can still drag windows between (which I use periodically). While I rarely use the per window widgets...it's probably not the case for others though...

[brianjmurrell]

Can this get updated and landed? It works wonderfully here.