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I do like a great deal of Gnome Shell, but what they very badly broke is when you have more than one of a certain window. I always have several terminals, and

I do like a great deal of Gnome Shell, but what they very badly broke is when you have more than one of a certain window. I always have several terminals, and on my dual screen desktop have two browser windows, two emacs windows, two eclipse windows (one on each screen). Gnome Shell really doesn't help in that scenario, nor does Unity when I tried it. (And Unity's app menu is obnoxious.) A taskbar has been the best UI solution found so far, although hopefully someone can improve on that. The people most likely to be seriously inconvenienced by the poor multiple window handling are the ones most likely to be able to moan about it. Gnome 3.4 doesn't let you use Gnome Shell with the "classic" Panel they provide. More annoying for me is if you use a classic session and try to put a panel on the left then it draws the text vertically which is almost unreadable. Modern screens have far more horizontal space available so why won't it go wider and draw horizontally?

nuclear_eclipse 14y ago
Alt-` allows you to switch between windows of a single app, or you can install an extension from http://extensions.gnome.org http://extensions.gnome.org that will give you the old style of Alt-tab behavior again.
- rogerbinns 14y ago
  I don't use keystrokes to switch between windows. I look at the list of the windows in the "taskbar" and directly click on the one I want. However I do use keystrokes to switch workspaces. Switching from a current emacs to the 6th terminal window isn't particularly practical for me using keystrokes (ymmv). I also drag and drop items in the taskbar so they are in the order that makes sense for me. I gave up on extensions because they kept breaking, and of course the moment there is a gnome version change they all stop working.
  - nuclear_eclipse 14y ago
    Fair enough. I generally tend to use something like tmux or multiple tabs in a single terminal window, or two windows at maximum, so I can definitely understand the limitations for you there. Something that I have picked up from using a Mac at work is using the Super key to bring up the expose-like overlay to find the window I'm looking for if it's not just a quick alt-tab or alt-` away.
    - rogerbinns 14y ago
      On my laptop I do use multiple terminal tabs because there is so much less screen area. When there are zero or one instance of a particular app/window then the expose like functionality in Gnome Shell is great. As I mentioned it would be great to be able to use the panel for the many instance apps and shell for the single instance ones but that isn't an option with Gnome 3.4. With Gnome 3.2 that is how I was doing things, but the panel wasn't part of gnome and instead there were several done as extensions each with its own quirks and breakages. I also don't use Gnome Shell on my laptop for battery savings instead opting for the panel without 3d effects and not using compositing in the window manager. I want as few CPU/GPU cycles as possible spent on the laptop.

nuclear_eclipse 14y ago

Alt-` allows you to switch between windows of a single app, or you can install an extension from http://extensions.gnome.org http://extensions.gnome.org that will give you the old style of Alt-tab behavior again.

rogerbinns 14y ago
I don't use keystrokes to switch between windows. I look at the list of the windows in the "taskbar" and directly click on the one I want. However I do use keystrokes to switch workspaces. Switching from a current emacs to the 6th terminal window isn't particularly practical for me using keystrokes (ymmv). I also drag and drop items in the taskbar so they are in the order that makes sense for me. I gave up on extensions because they kept breaking, and of course the moment there is a gnome version change they all stop working.
- nuclear_eclipse 14y ago
  Fair enough. I generally tend to use something like tmux or multiple tabs in a single terminal window, or two windows at maximum, so I can definitely understand the limitations for you there. Something that I have picked up from using a Mac at work is using the Super key to bring up the expose-like overlay to find the window I'm looking for if it's not just a quick alt-tab or alt-` away.
  - rogerbinns 14y ago
    On my laptop I do use multiple terminal tabs because there is so much less screen area. When there are zero or one instance of a particular app/window then the expose like functionality in Gnome Shell is great. As I mentioned it would be great to be able to use the panel for the many instance apps and shell for the single instance ones but that isn't an option with Gnome 3.4. With Gnome 3.2 that is how I was doing things, but the panel wasn't part of gnome and instead there were several done as extensions each with its own quirks and breakages. I also don't use Gnome Shell on my laptop for battery savings instead opting for the panel without 3d effects and not using compositing in the window manager. I want as few CPU/GPU cycles as possible spent on the laptop.