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Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

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Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

#91

Post by michaelsbradley »

ebiester wrote: post #67
phkahler wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for pointing out that it supports floating windows. I use a 55" 4k monitor so I manually lay out my app windows and would hate tiling (only rarely used stuff goes up top and I drag those down when needed). I use and like gnome but there are a few thing I hate about it so I'll give this a try.

Tiling people would create a group up on the top. When you want to bring it down, it's just a keyboard command away. After going back to mac (for work reasons), It's been a painful experience adjusting to the lack of tiling.

Tiling isn't particularly difficult to implement on macOS with e.g. Phoenix:

https://github.com/kasper/phoenix/

I hacked something together several+ years ago (see below) based on someone else's config, and I've maybe edited it twice since then, so it likely can be substantially improved. Also, I'm sure it's not as slick as a true tiling manager, but I've certainly gotten a lot of mileage out of it:

https://gist.github.com/michaelsbradleyjr/a8ef81982420d06118...

Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

#92

Post by whoisburbansky »

dashwav wrote: post #76
confounded wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> After going back to mac (for work reasons), It's been a painful experience adjusting to the lack of tiling. Same situation, I use ‘yabai’ on macos, which is similar enough to i3 for me.

Yabai ( https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai ) and skhd ( https://github.com/koekeishiya/skhd ) together makes a very powerful combination that works extremely well. It's as close to i3 as you can get on MacOS, and outside of a few odd things with 3 monitors I haven't run into any issues. Yabai is actually the second iteration of tiling windows that koekeishiya has made and it's super well developed.

Seconding this; the only thing I miss from i3 is the fact that yabai almost by definition can't be better integrated with the OS, so there's a slight increase in latency that's barely perceptible but enough to make me notice how much zippier my Linux boxes + i3 are. Small price to pay for how much more comfortable they make me on macOS, though.

Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

#93

Post by transpostmeta »

bobince wrote: post #84
yrro wrote: post #39

I find the app-based window navigation in vanilla GNOME 3 rather frustrating, and try as I might, I just can't get comfortable navigating between what I think of as applications. This is because I have a few applications (Firefox, Terminal) that are really not applications in and of themselves; the applications are really Outlook, JIRA, Confluence, Slack, OpenShift (logged in as cluster admin), OpenShift (logged in a…

Very this. My mind is not app-centric. I want the shell where I'm looking at logs, the editor where I'm taking notes, the browser where I'm checking some doc. I don't care to think about which terminal application the shell is inside, select that, then find I've opened a different terminal window and have to search through the windows separately. I don't care whether the doc is loaded in Firefox or Chromium so don't…

It's interesting. Microsoft agreed with this philosophy and fought tooth and nail against tabbing in browsers, opting instead that each browser tab be it's own window and accessible from the task bar. After all other browsers had switched, they were forced to introduce that in IE as well.

The worst offender here is OSX. I still haven't figured out a good way to switch between multiple open windows of the same application, not even the file explorer (Finder). It's a huge pain.

Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

#94

Post by young_unixer »

spiffytech wrote: post #63
boogies wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn’t GNOME at least have a setting to change alt-tab to window- instead of app-based?

It does, but e.g. on Ubuntu you have to install an extra configurator tool to access that setting.

Without tweak tool, Gnome shell is unusable.

Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

#95

Post by ctrlrsf »

transpostmeta wrote: post #93
bobince wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very this. My mind is not app-centric. I want the shell where I'm looking at logs, the editor where I'm taking notes, the browser where I'm checking some doc. I don't care to think about which terminal application the shell is inside, select that, then find I've opened a different terminal window and have to search through the windows separately. I don't care whether the doc is loaded in Firefox or Chromium so don't…

It's interesting. Microsoft agreed with this philosophy and fought tooth and nail against tabbing in browsers, opting instead that each browser tab be it's own window and accessible from the task bar. After all other browsers had switched, they were forced to introduce that in IE as well. The worst offender here is OSX. I still haven't figured out a good way to switch between multiple open windows of the same applica…

Just press Command-` to switch between windows of the same application. Command-Tab to switch between windows of other applications.

Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

#96

Post by [deleted] »

transpostmeta wrote: post #93
bobince wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very this. My mind is not app-centric. I want the shell where I'm looking at logs, the editor where I'm taking notes, the browser where I'm checking some doc. I don't care to think about which terminal application the shell is inside, select that, then find I've opened a different terminal window and have to search through the windows separately. I don't care whether the doc is loaded in Firefox or Chromium so don't…

It's interesting. Microsoft agreed with this philosophy and fought tooth and nail against tabbing in browsers, opting instead that each browser tab be it's own window and accessible from the task bar. After all other browsers had switched, they were forced to introduce that in IE as well. The worst offender here is OSX. I still haven't figured out a good way to switch between multiple open windows of the same applica…

[deleted]

Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

#97

Post by armoredkitten »

wayneftw wrote: post #73

Can the user merge the workspace panel into the the system panel and move all that to the bottom of the screen instead? I honestly can't stand global top bars and "system panels" that are nothing more than always-visible launcher menus. They're just a waste of space. IMO Chrome looks ridiculous in the video, with a set of tabs directly underneath the workspace panel tabs. What I'd really like to see is XFCE with auto…

A few months ago I set up i3 to work within Xfce (essentially swapping out xfwm4 as the window manager), and I love it. It took a bit of tinkering to get the two to play nicely, as you might expect, but once I got it set up properly it was great. I wanted to use a tiling WM, but I had a setup I really liked with Xfce and didn't want to give up all the DE niceties with my panels, system tray, etc. This gives me the best of both worlds as far as I'm concerned.

That said, I agree with you that it would be nice to have a built-in option to switch between tiling and floating. I've seen that Pop_OS has this, but that's also using Gnome.

Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

#98

Post by michaelmrose »

transpostmeta wrote: post #93
bobince wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very this. My mind is not app-centric. I want the shell where I'm looking at logs, the editor where I'm taking notes, the browser where I'm checking some doc. I don't care to think about which terminal application the shell is inside, select that, then find I've opened a different terminal window and have to search through the windows separately. I don't care whether the doc is loaded in Firefox or Chromium so don't…

It's interesting. Microsoft agreed with this philosophy and fought tooth and nail against tabbing in browsers, opting instead that each browser tab be it's own window and accessible from the task bar. After all other browsers had switched, they were forced to introduce that in IE as well. The worst offender here is OSX. I still haven't figured out a good way to switch between multiple open windows of the same applica…

They were wrong. Emphatically. Ridiculously wrong. Remember for context that virtually nobody was using virtual desktops for windows as it not part of the UI unless you installed it and it sucked besides. Also remember most people's internet was very very slow. Screens were also not that big. Not that they are much bigger now with everyone using laptops.

Grouping related windows in the task bar makes it frustrating to use it because everything involves multiple clicks. Once you got beyond a certain number of apps the task bar sucked without grouping because there wasn't enough text to display a long enough label to distinguish between windows.

When something takes a long time to load you are incentivized to create a new tab if you might want to come back to that resource rather than waiting for it to load again. This absolutely incentivizes using multiple tabs. If you have 8-12 browser windows + 2 or 3 other windows you are already past the threshold where you have to group windows in the task bar to use it and are now changing tabs by moving your mouse at the way to the bottom of the screen clicking on the browser icon and then hunting for the desired text then clicking again. This is in a word annoying.

if your browser supports tabs you can have 2-3 other windows and 2 browser windows and use an ungrouped taskbar. You can also hit one hotkey to open a new tab or use in browser tab switching in place of all desktop window switching to switch between several. This is much much much better.

Even if all other sins were removed the browser tabs represent a logical grouping and additional context that would be lost with just windows.

I can close them as a group I can book mark them as a group I can save them for later perusal as a group. I can use a side tab extension to more easily switch between a large number of tabs. I can right click on a link and open several links in the background without changing my current context.

They designed a user interface that was only useful for grandma opening 1 browser window at a time and maybe 2 apps at a time.

Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

#99

Post by michaelmrose »

scoutt wrote: post #47

Can two windows overlap? Or are they just opened full-screen or inside a tile side-by-side? If not, then I don't like that very much. For example the calculator: I don't want it to take 1/3 or 1/4 of the screen. It's like going back into a 35 years ago pre DESQview era. Edit: nevermind. "In Material Shell windows are tiled. These means they are organised in a predictable way in which they do not overlap" . I guess I…

In i3 you can perform operations based on window criteria for example if calculator don't tile with for_window. KDE has window rules, Linux in general has devilspie2.

If it doesn't have this feature it probably should.

Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

#100

Post by riquito »

dubcanada wrote: post #77

My biggest issue with i3 and awesome is as soon as I plug in a second monitor the whole things just falls apart and it becomes too much to manage. Anyone try this with multiple monitors?

What's the exact issue? If you assign a bunch of workspaces (say 6,7,8,9) to the secondary monitor when it appears your flow shouldn't really change
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