D21083: [effects/presentwindows] Allow closing windows on middle-click

graesslin added a comment.


  Please do not add this back. This is a very hot topic to many users, but let me explain. I was the one adding the feature in the first place and I removed it again. Personally I think adding the mouse actions functionality was a big mistake. I did this in 2008 when I joined KWin development. My work on Present Windows back then was a failure. I - and Lucas - added several features which turned the code base into an unmaintainable mess and significantly affected the stability of overall KWin. Several of the features added back then were reverted and replaced by better functionality. What I wanted to achieve back then was having the functionality of closing windows. My big mistake was to make this configurable. Instead of just adding this feature we made it completely configurable and turned it into a space ship control of window management. But nothing else in Present Windows is a window management feature. As the name says, it's intended to present all windows, not to manage them. Furthermore this introduced a big usability issue by reusing Present Windows in desktop grid to present the windows but not having the user interaction feature.
  
  A few years later we found a better way to support closing windows in Present Windows: the close button. The only logical result was to remove this feature again. This is the correct decision. If I had not been so stupid before we would have been able to remove the complete mouse interaction feature but the over configurability made this impossible. Nowadays with even more experience I would remove it as it was a failure from user interaction, discoverability and maintenance. It's one of the areas in KWin where I am really ashamed of what I have done to the code.
  
  I admitted defeat years ago and called out to rewrite Present Windows and Desktop Grid as a KWin QML script. Unfortunately nobody stepped up to do this task and so Present Windows and Desktop Grid stayed in the bitrotten state where we have huge user interaction problems and an unmaintainable code base.
  
  I know that "many" users scream for this feature, but in fact it's just a handful. You can really count them. Before merging this feature I urge you to look through the support information attached to our bug reports and check how many users actually change anything in the effects. I would continue this comment, but my baby just woke up.

REPOSITORY
  R108 KWin

REVISION DETAIL
  https://phabricator.kde.org/D21083

To: ngraham, #kwin, davidedmundson, broulik
Cc: graesslin, kwin, jraleigh, GB_2, mkulinski, ragreen, jackyalcine, Pitel, iodelay, bwowk, ZrenBot, ngraham, alexeymin, lesliezhai, ali-mohamed, hardening, jensreuterberg, abetts, sebas, apol, mart