workspace switcher: Add option to display window icons

[anaximeno]

Closes #11455
Depends on linuxmint/muffin#766

• ex. 1

  

• ex. 2
  

Replaces #11530 (I closed and recreated this pull request with a cleaner commit log)

[clefebvre]

Pretty cool idea but it needs some work and thoughts.

Marking as Next for now.

[anaximeno]

Pretty cool idea but it needs some work and thoughts.

Marking as Next for now.

Sure I'll take a look at that, I can auto-hide the icon if the window area is smaller than the icon size in either of the directions. I'll test that, and see how it looks.

[anaximeno]

I converted the window icon size settings option into a combobox (to maintain consistency with other parts like how panel icon sizes are selected) and added an option (by default) to auto size the icons according to the workspace graph size:

[Boris-Dimov]

Tested this on Mint 22.2 with Cinnamon 6.4.8, works like a charm. Thank you to the developer, would love to see it merged into master soon.

[anaximeno]

Did a rebase on master, I think this should be ready for consideration.

[Copilot]

Pull request overview

This PR adds an optional feature to display window icons in the workspace switcher applet's visual mode. When enabled, application icons appear centered in the window representations, with configurable sizes or automatic sizing based on available space. The implementation introduces a new WindowGraph class to encapsulate individual window rendering and icon management, refactoring the previous monolithic canvas painting approach into a more object-oriented design.

Key changes:

• Added two new settings: show-window-icons (toggle) and window-icon-size (configurable/auto)
• Refactored window rendering from a single canvas approach to individual WindowGraph objects per window
• Optimized updates to only repaint focused windows when they change position or size

Reviewed changes

Copilot reviewed 2 out of 2 changed files in this pull request and generated 3 comments.

File	Description
settings-schema.json	Added two new settings with visual display mode dependencies for controlling window icon display and size
applet.js	Introduced WindowGraph class for per-window rendering with icon support, refactored WorkspaceGraph to use the new architecture, and added optimization for partial updates

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[anaximeno]

Resolved copilot suggestions.

[Copilot]

Pull request overview

Copilot reviewed 2 out of 2 changed files in this pull request and generated 4 comments.

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[anaximeno]

Resolved suggestions.

[clefebvre]

Thanks @anaximeno, it's a nice evolution of the visual representation. I don't think it should be an option, I think it should be an improvement.

Until now the representation was accurate but complex:

Because there were no icons and maximized windows were just an empty large rectangle, we used transparency to show underlying windows and workaround this.

If you're adding icons, you're essentially solving this issue, and thus we no longer need this complexity. You can get rid of transparency here and just mimic what is seen on the screen.

You don't need any extra options. Icons should auto-adjust and be visible.

[anaximeno]

(...)

If you're adding icons, you're essentially solving this issue, and thus we no longer need this complexity. You can get rid of transparency here and just mimic what is seen on the screen.

You don't need any extra options. Icons should auto-adjust and be visible.

Ok, as I understand I should remove the additional settings and assume the icons should show by default. I'll send an update in moments.

[clefebvre]

I asked @mtwebster to take a look to see if we could hide obfuscated windows. It's not simple..

otherwise it looks like that:

[mtwebster]

I made a PR for muffin to add a new workspace method:

linuxmint/muffin#766

let windows = this.workspace.list_unobscured_windows();

note:

• This already skips minimized windows, you can remove that from your filter.
• Most-recently-used order isn't relevant, this is a visual representation only, so you should be able to eliminate that sort also.
• The graph doesn't seem to refresh in certain situations where it should - like maximizing and unmaximizing, tiling.. things that may change size and shape (and thus expose or cover other windows), but not the focus window. (Maybe a couple more things to monitor on the focused window - maximized, tile-mode... )

edit..

• another thing I noticed you're triggering full refreshes (rebuilding this list) every time you enter/leave the applet itself, which could maybe be filtered out.

[anaximeno]

Sure, I'll look into that.

[anaximeno]

Ok, I've with tested linuxmint/muffin#766 in a VM and made the updates, I think it should be adapted to work as intended with that new feature now.

Edit:

@mtwebster
Regarding the additional signals to listen to, I think they aren't needed, the already listened to "position-changed" and "size-changed" seems to cover state changes that occur during operations such as tile, maximize and unmaximize, etc.

You probably noticed it wasn't completely refreshing the graph, not filtering the obfuscated windows, however that was due to the approach I was using to only update the focus window area instead of the whole graph on changes concerning only the focused window (like size change, position change, etc). I've reverted this behavior to instead update the whole graph of the current workspace, so that the obfuscated windows can be filtered immediately as they get covered up by the focused window.