Deskbar bottom/top mode

Development OS
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I have a question, when the deskbar is in the Top/bottom one still cant click on items to bring up the application, even though the thing looks like a button, it behaves like a combobox. I would expect the Hide/Show thing to popup on right click instead. (Okay, it works with double clicking it seems, but this is even more un-intuitive to me)

Is this intentional? Maybe a BeOS leftover?

If this is wanted to stay, maybe I can make a checkbox for a more windows compatible mode, so this behaves different in that case.

Note that in the normal mode with expand all applications On I don’t have this issue, i can always click on the open application.

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I kinda feel like so many “quirks” on BeOS/Haiku UI can be traced to it supporting the use of a mouse with only one button :slight_smile:.

I agree. In top/bottom mode, I would expect a single click on a app’s name to bring up its window (assuming it only has one).

I’ve seen this discussed on this forum before. IIRC, with some other devs basically shutting down the idea of changing it (or at least not leaving much room for further discussion).

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I wouldn’t mind if the current quirky behavior stays as default, but there should be an option to change it.

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It behaves like a menu. I proposed changing Deskbar to bring up the window on a single click if there’s only one window but people didn’t like that idea. So, yes, this behavior is intentional.

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OpenTracker was certainly a BeOS leftover.

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The behavior is exactly the same as in vertical mode without the application expander, and it is as Be designed it.

Personally I use the application expander and vertical mode, so I can quickly access my windows, but I don’t have a lot of windows.

This user interface is designed for applications with many windows. It goes for consistency: it doesn’t matter if an app has one or multiple windows. The deskbar will always open a menu with a few options and the window list. Predictible and repeatable.

If you change it to behave differently when there is only one window, you lose that consistency. If you change it to always raise all windows of the app, that will be very annoying to those people with dozen of tracker windows. If you change it so that vertical and horizontal modes behave differently, you also lose a form of consistency (but maybe that will mainly be a problem for people writing the documentation).

In some versions of Windows, the loss of consistency is compensated by having the button visually different when there are multiple windows.

If you want to change this, you also need to take into account the case where an application has no window. Then the main click would do nothing, which would be confusing, and only the right click would allow to act on the app. Currently that will only allow to close the app, but ideally I would like to allow apps to add custom entries in that menu. In many cases that could replace the need for deskbar replicants that act like windows systray icons (just showing an icon with no info, that is only a way to have an app specific menu without the app having a window).

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I think what he means is that even With application expander (once setup on automaticly expand) click on rise/hide should be possible.

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Always these mysterious people… In any case, this can become an option. Or it should be an “easy” option to be able to disable deskbar from the gui and install a replacement.
Probably requires first divorcing it from twitcher though.

To me the Top/Bottom and The low/high mode seem quite different. Making these consistent is in the long run maybe not the best idea. I consider putting it at the bottom mainly something to make the system usable to people who are used more to windows or so.

I disagree here a bit. I see no reason why an app with no window should appear at all. Maybe I’m missing something here, but for me the only time this appears is when an application hangs and doesn’t properly quit, or is misconfigured and fails to open a window.

Similarily I think no window that is visible should skip the deskbar, not even dialog boxes or tool windows.

Not quit related, but a great idea. It would greatly increase the usability of that menu. Considering that we already have per-application audio streams in Haiku a great option could be to set per-application volume there. (Either via the system, or exposed for apps that already have this like MediaPlayer)

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I think I have explained quite clearly why it is the way it is. And I don’t think I am mysterious.

Do you plan to also add advertising in the Deskbar menu to look more like Windows?

Ok that is a stupid way to say it, but to me “make it work more like Windows” is not a great argument. They get some things right, they get some things very wrong.

I understand wanting to reach windows with a single click. In fact, that is not really a new idea in Haiku, you can read stippi’s notes about it from back in 2011: Deskbar rewrite | Haiku Project

Some of his ideas have since been implemented, but not quite all of them. Some things I disagree with, and some should be reviewed as we may have taken a different direction.

In my case, I keep DeskBar in vertical mode (I can fit a lot more windows in the list that way), use “expander” mode (where each window is listed in deskbar), and I keep the application names visible. This setup gives me the most efficient use for now.

The horizontal version of DeskBar doesn’t have anything like “expander” mode. Maybe that’s the way to go, in some way or another:

  • Reuse the same checkbox, no need for a new option
  • Maybe make it look and behave similar if that makes sense, maybe make it work a bit different in horizontal mode

This way, we keep the consistency, and I think we can make everyone happy, since people can just untick that checkbox and keep their DeskBar as it is now.

It would probably look something like:

[Leaf menu] [App1 Icon][App1 Window1][App1 Window2] [App2 Icon][App2 Window1][App2 Window2] … [Replicants][Clock]

(here I’m ignoring stippi’s suggestion to replace the Leaf menus with multiple separate menus to essentially have one less level of digging to do, as well as several other of his suggested changes. Let’s do one thing at a time :smiley: ).

Clicking the app icon could either bring up the existing deskbar menu, or maybe do fold/unfold of the windows on the primary mouse button, and the menu on secondary mouse button. I think I would be OK with a similar change to the vertical deskbar in expander mode (I rarely use the menu in its current state).

A click on a window would raise and activate it (as it already does in vertical mode). The window items can behave as in vertical+expander mode: the icon changes for windows on other workspaces, greyed out windows are minimized, etc. Since the logic is already there in vertical mode, this should not be too much work to achieve?

In the current situation, maybe. But if the DeskBar entry could get a customizable menu, that changes everything. Now you can have your app runnning and have a “new window” there when you need it. Or you can have the entire controls for the app in the DeskBar entry (I imagine a music player which would run that way most of the time, with the menu having play/pause buttons, and then you could drag and drop music files or directories or queries to it). No need for a media player app to waste any more space on screen than that, I think?

I have also mentionned the (mis)use of deskbar replicants for things that could be implemented this way. That is another case where we took a not-so-great trend from Windows and did the same without thinking about it. I like replicants that show useful info (like PowerStatus and KeymapSwitcher), but I think some other things don’t really belong there (probably most uses of QSystray, and generally anything that uses this to implement some kind of “run in background” behavior).

And so, I would like the possibility of apps with no windows to continue showing in DeskBar, if possible. Just to keep that possibility open. But with a bit of thinking about the design, I think that shouldn’t be a problem for the changes you want to make. It will just look quite a bit different from what Windows does.

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My comment was in reference to jscipione’s comment, that (unnamed) people not liking something, isn’t really something one can discuss… It was not ment as a jab towards you.

To be clear, i did not mean “Make it more like windows” in the sense of windows 10/11 or whatever. More like, the top/bottom mode could use some ideas from windows… 98 :slight_smile:

I think the bottom mode is too distinct to use the same setting for expander mode, and i’d rather have that seperate. I don’t care about keeping a setting for those who want it to behave like it does now.

I’m not planing to remove apps with no windows from deskbar anytime soon, but i still think this is wierd and serves no purpose. (especially the “empty” tracker bar just makes one ignore it…)

I guess that can change in time when some of your proposed changes are implemented, but even then. I don’t want a MediaPlayer with no window. On Haiku this barely takes ressources, and it makes no sense to me to destroy the window. That to me is also geared towards the too-many-replicants case you mentioned.

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That is a system from another time, when running more than a handful of windows was all you could do. Windows 95 was very good at what it did, but this specific part was changed later (in Windows XP if I’m not wrong) to handle grouping windows together. And they did it in a way that is a little closer to what we do when “expander” is disabled (grouped windows show a menu on the primary button click).

I’m not sure what you have in mind then. If it works the way I tried to explain, it is extremely close to the current vertical expander mode.

If you want to do something different with a new option, this goes against one of the rules of Haiku: “sane defaults, not maximum configurability”. That is not a hard rule, but you then have to convince us why adding another option/behavior is so significantly better than reusing the existing one.

For me screen space is the most valuable resource, at least until we get multiple displays support. Disk space, RAM and CPU, I have enough (well, except when compiling WebKit :sweat_smile: ). But screen space, never so. Hence I go with tiny fonts (as much as my eyes allow it) and enjoy the quite compact UI spacing in Haiku.

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A Hidden window is not a Window that doesn’t exist. :slight_smile:

The MediaPlayer can be hidden, but i don’t think the entry for it’s Window should be removed, or that it should destroy it’s window.

Sure, but, atleast with how the setting is named now “Show Expander”, it makes no sense to use in the bottom mode. If you really want to we could name it “ALternate application menu” or something, but that is a mouthfull. (also the expand new apps by default option is a bit wierd, it shouldn’t really be an option IMO and always be on)

Windows XP multiple windows was quite enjoyable to use, If i recall correctly it would only start grouping stuff together once space was getting tight. But it dealt with windows of apps, not with apps as deskbar does. It’s a different expectation.

Your Idea of having one Icon for the app which shows/Hides all windows of the app right of it sounds good to do.

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It groups them by app when there are several of them. So, they started with windows, and then made something partially grouping by apps.

As much as I’d love to have a way to group windows in Deskbar differently (for example a terminal, text editor, and web browser all belonging together because they are for work on the same project), I think we should stay with some kind of grouping by apps for now.

It is very close to the expander in vertical mode if you hide application names. And I think it could look nice :slight_smile:

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So far it looks a bit silly!

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I reckon it will look a bit better with the Actual windows visible then : )

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I wanted to add that the middle mouse click button seems to do the expected behavior of raising the application window if there’s only one. But if it’s WebPositive, at least in some cases it seems to not only raise it, but also open a new tab, for some reason.

My opinions about the topic are:

  • I see no point in having both main mouse buttons doing the exact same thing, much less when that thing is opening a menu, requiring extra clicks to just bring the only window on top.
  • I see no point in entries with no windows opening a context menu that serves no purpose except for saying there’s no windows, such as is the case with Tracker. At least make that context menu have an option to open a Tracker window, or add more options about what you might want to enter (recent folders, home, system, etc.). If you insist in keeping the current behavior, at least use the standard UI element to show an informative message like that, which is a tooltip.
  • It should work the same no matter if the bar is above or on the side
  • It’s nice that at least the functionality exists for the middle mouse button, but take into account some laptops don’t have a middle mouse button, and some people find uncomfortable the mouse wheel click (someone on the IRC mentioned it). And make it behave properly on WebPositive, it can’t be raising the window and opening new tabs. It’s very inconsistent.
  • I see no problem and no inconsistency on having for example the left mouse click raising the window if there’s only one, and opening a context menu if there’s more than one or none (in this case as long as it’s a proactive context menu, not an informative text within a context menu).
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Yes, it is quite useful feature. For example some applications can still do something in background even if all windows are closed, so you can easily see that application is still running and quit it if needed. Also I use windowless applications to run some background services that are visible in Deskbar and can be easily quitted.

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A guy is sick of Windows, fed up with Linux — he decides to try something new, something alternative. He finds Haiku — a lightweight, fresh, unique OS. And the very first thing he does? Drags the Deskbar to the bottom of the screen just like in Windows. Puts on his familiar wallpaper. Starts asking others (and sometimes even demanding) those same features and habits he was used to before.

So he ends up turning this fresh, unique system into yet another copy of what he just ran away from.
The question is — the f*ck for?

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Because this combination is supposed to do the same action as application launched second time. For text editors it will open new Untitled window, for browsers it will open new tab, for non-document applications it will just bring application window to front.

There are no meaning to put separate action to every possible combination of input. It makes things unnecessary complicated.

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Intersting to observe various opinions about bottom/top deskbars, and a bit sad to see that hardly anyone mentions left/right MacOSX dock mode. Apple themselves dont have left dock as default (blame marketting), and of all the options of various docks/tasbars/panels/deskbars I’ve used, left dock is my favourite. Add a shortcut to the Application folder and favourite directories and you get spring folders as well. Best experience in my eyes.

I personally use Deskbar on the right, but would love to see permanent full size launch icons added to deskbar as well (merge LnLauncher and Deskbar). I’d also like no visible text, just tooltip text. So having visible icons with no running app/windows becomes natural, since its a shortcut. Only show expander when more than one window open. Also nice to have workspace indicator. We all use multiple workspaces, dont we :wink:

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We’re already mentioning the reasons, and it’s not to do it like Windows, it’s too make it make sense, to be practical and intuitive, aside from consistent.

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