VMD-L Mailing List

From: Peter Husen (phusen_at_sdu.dk)
Date: Fri Dec 11 2015 - 06:31:44 CST

I understand what you mean. However, if considered a "feature", I
believe it relies on sabotaging the window manager's design. I guess it
might also break other window managers.

Clicking the Launcher icon for an application that already has focus
will show you all of its windows "spread out" to allow you to quickly
chose one of them (or close some of them). If you don't like this
workflow, you can right click the icon to get a list of the applications
windows with window titles. This is arguably faster than hovering over
each "?" icon to see the window titles. Furthermore, these icons are,
for me, often compacted due to too many icons in the Launcher, but of
course, you might have a bigger screen. This also gets worse when, as
you mention, also other applications have "?" icons - I, for one, tend
to drown in them. As you can see in my other reply, adding the WM_CLASS
also allows me to assign an icon to VMD, which helps a lot in keeping
track of my windows.

Btw, you can also switch between windows of an application using the
mouse scroll wheel over the launcher icon, and Alt+Tab also groups the
windows together under the app.

Best regards,
Peter Husen

On 12/10/2015 11:57 PM, Josh Vermaas wrote:
> Hi Peter,
>
> I've noticed this behavior too, but I actually prefer it this way, as
> it DOESN'T group them together in the launcher. This lets me pick
> between the 3 or 4 active VMD windows I have alot more easily. :) More
> generally, VMD isn't the only program that does this, and the
> "questionmark box" is the default for when Ubuntu can't figure out
> what the window should otherwise be called. This problem isn't unique
> to VMD. Pymol and Chimera have the same behavior.
>
> -Josh Vermaas