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1

Monday, February 25th 2008, 11:48am

[REQUEST] Layout templating

PROBLEM:
With the new, huge monitors (19"+) there is a possibility to open and use several windows at the same time. Very often you work with the same 3-4 programs at the same time and each time you start these programs, you need to resize their windows in order for all of them to be visible.

SOLUTION:
Desktop layout templates. You can think of them as of HTML frames - the placeholders for some content (in this case - placeholders for some windows). So, user should be able to define a template, load it and open windows in template's frames.

Do you think this feature could be implemented into KDE?

2

Monday, March 10th 2008, 1:31pm

RE: [REQUEST] Layout templating

I like that idea though the exact design would take some thought.

3

Tuesday, March 11th 2008, 12:35pm

RE: [REQUEST] Layout templating

Well, i imagined something like this:

Creating the template:
- Click the tray icon and choose 'new template'
- Some kind of rulers should appear on the edges of the screen
- Drag a line from rulers and place it somewhere on the screen. You can create a grid doing this.
- Tray icon > save

Using the template:
- Tray icon > load the template
- All the open windows stay the same as they were before loading the template
- You drag/drop windows between the template's fields and they get resized to match the dimensions of the field
- Mouse over the border of the field brings the list of the windows in that field. You choose the one that should be on top
- If you maximize the window, it gets out of the field (and gets maximized)

So, basically, everything is just a matter of resizing windows. All the windows should behave as normal (maximize, minimize, close...).
I hope this is not too dificult to implement...

4

Tuesday, March 11th 2008, 12:52pm

RE: [REQUEST] Layout templating

Of course, in some later version, this templating engine might be able to load templates with predefined applications ("load this template with movie player in first field and chat client in second and weather widget in third...."). But for now, the simple "resize-my-windows-like-this" functionality would just be great

This post has been edited 1 times, last edit by "zorglub76" (Mar 11th 2008, 12:53pm)