Alberto Ruiz talks about the taskbar in Gnome wasting a lot of
space, and how launchers, applets and notifications could all be merged
(in a post which sounds rather like a pitch for OS X’s Dock, or at least
a pitch for awn, which is rather like it). I personally turned off
my taskbar (and the whole bottom panel) ages ago, because I want more
screen room. Instead, I added a Window Selector to the top panel, on the
far right-hand-side. To switch between apps by name, therefore, I just
throw the mouse up and right into the corner and click, and then choose
an app from the menu I then get. I really haven’t noticed the lack of
the taskbar at all. (To be honest, I
don’t even do that most of the time; I alt-tab between apps. To be truly
honest, now what I do is throw my mouse at the bottom left corner
which does Compiz’s scale plugin (the OS X Exposê thing), but not
everyone’s running Compiz.) (An extra note here: OS X has a nice trick
where you can click on the window list you get from holding down
alt-tab. Can we do that?) I’m not sure about merging launchers and
notification icons, though. There’s stuff that I want a notification
icon for (XChat-Gnome, the new mail notifier, Pidgin) that I don’t need
a permanently-visible launcher for because I hardly ever start them up
(once at the beginning of a session, or not at all because they start themselves).
The length of the taskbar
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