Show desktop thumbnails on the Taskbar.

[Dennis McCunney]

The VDM I used before migrating to Win10 was another open source
product - WindowsPager. It was lightweight, without a lot of
features. But the win for me was that it showed my four configured
desktops as thumbnails in the Taskbar. I could switch between them
with the mouse, and move things from one desktop to another by
drag-and-drop on the Taskbar.

It runs under Win10, in the sense of executing and showing in Task
Manager, but the thumbnails don't appear in the Taskbar. I
reluctantly dropped it, and use the native Win10 feature. It works,
but in typical MS fashion, when they finally got around to
implementing it, it still wasn't as good as anything used instead.

If grid switcher can implement Taskbar thumbnails, I'll be delighted.

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Dennis
https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519

[Simon Liddington]

Hi Dennis,

Nice to hear from you. I understand your pain. Its tough because desktops become such an integral part of the way you use a computer.

I wrote this because I was used to Linux and then VirtuaWin desktops but wasn't quite happy with some things with Virtuawin and thought Win 10 desktops could do better, which they do but I wanted to navigate the desktops in the same way as I was used to (like you).

For me, I avoid using the mouse as I find the keyboard more efficient and I am more often typing into the programs that I use. Therefore I haven't thought about mouse navigation much.

I do remember trying windows pager when I switched from Linux but I like to use multiple rows of desktops which I beleive is supported but I suspect doesn't really work well with the tasbar thumbnail display - I don't remember what it did, do you know?

I am curious what are the important aspects of the taskbar thumbnails UI for you...

Firstly when you say thumbnails - do you mean the representation of the desktops, or the representation of the windows on the desktops?

Is it important to you to constantly be able to see the windows that are on each desktop? - I can't quite imagine going as far as doing this part you see.

If you had a something on the taskbar for each desktop and you could switch desktops by clicking them, would that go most of the way for you?
...Or perhaps on hovering over the system tray icon it presented a grid of buttons you could click to switch desktops... hmm, Linux used to have a larger "icon" and you could just click on the segments of the icon for each desktop ... perhaps I should do something like that but in the taskbar instead.

For dragging windows between desktops I don't find much of a need for this as I just move the current window to another desktop with my hotkeys. Also Win 10 kind of allows you to do what you want but you have to hit Win-Tab first you can then select different desktopns down the bottom and drag windows to the desktop you want at the bottom.

Having said that because I sometimes need to find a window and so you want to be able to see what windows are on what desktops in one view/screen and you sometimes want to completely rearrange your windows I had thought of doing a better Win-Tab which allows you to see all desktops simultaneously as described in https://sourceforge.net/p/virtual-desktop-grid-switcher/discussion/newfeatures/thread/65133616/
but from your point of view this would involve first bringing up the screen with all the desktops and their windows represented - it would be full screen and then you could drag things around to your hearts content before closing it. I would make this appear on a configurable hotkey and in some easy way using the mouse via the system tray icon (or taskbar icon if I go to that).

Let me know your thoughts

Simon