Should 'allDesktops' setting from rc.xml be exposed in obconf-qt?

[jamieosullivan]

Hi, I use Lubuntu with lxqt as my main distro for working and find a few usability issues whenever I'm setting up after installation. One of these is the default behaviour for the task-switcher (Alt-Tab) popup being to show the windows from all desktops rather than just from the current desktop, and the absence of an option in the UI to change this behaviour.

I generally do a google search and find out that I need to edit the "allDesktops" option to change this (I've done it so many times, I should really remember it by now) but it would be nice to be able to change it in the UI, some other people have encountered this too:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1376831/task-switcher-on-lubuntu-20-04-showing-all-tasks-instead-of-task-from-current-wo
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1380073/where-is-task-manager-task-switcher-configuration-stored-in-a-system-with-lxqt?rq=1
https://discourse.lubuntu.me/t/alt-tab-to-switch-windows-on-current-desktop-only/1319

I made a change that exposes this option in the UI, see PR #253. There may be better or simpler solutions.

For example, I don't personally see why anyone would want to have all open windows listed and the issue could arguably be addressed by shipping the rc.xml with allDesktops set to "no". In Openbox itself, it appears that this is the default behaviour? However it does seem that some people do want to be able to change that, e.g.

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/631499/openbox-how-to-show-windows-from-all-virtual-desktops-in-alttab-dialog

[stefonarch]

Task switcher belongs to the WM or Wayland compositor in use, and LXQt has no default one. Configuration files should be optimized by distributions IMHO but I see that this mostly is done only just for wallpaper and theme, probably by lack of manpower/time.

There is https://github.com/zjes/lxqt-appswitcher which is WM independent, it had only theming not completely implemented and it had useful option (number windows listed, current desktop ecc), it doesn't compile anymore here unfortunately.

Will test the PR, thanks!

[jamieosullivan]

Okay, I tested it with X11 on Lubuntu 24.10, but not Wayland. It probably still needs a bit of work, maybe it should be a draft rather than a PR.

I found the change in lubuntu's settings repo where the default behaviour was changed, I might open an issue there to discuss it as well.

Thanks for referring me to lxqt-appswitcher, I hadn't seen it. Looks like it was in lxqt for a while but then got deprecated in favour of WMs' own switchers. Openbox's simple X popup seems fine to me, at least for the simple out-of-the-box functionality, but I guess there's plenty of apps like this that can be used for further tweaking of icons etc.

[stefonarch]

Obconf-qt isn't usable under Wayland, never mind, it's X11 only.
In some way labwc-tweaks for labwc is the counterpart on Wayland; also there each compositor has it's own switcher, if any.

[jamieosullivan]

Ah of course, because openbox is ancient and X11 only - was still getting the lay of the land with this stuff.

FYI I asked on lubuntu about their default setting here - they didn't hear any complaints about it and are looking ahead to Wayland so I guess it won't change at this point.

The intended usage for this feature is mentioned in the Openbox 3.4 release notes , so if I fix up the patch to search for the NextWindow/PreviousWindow actions regardless of the keybindings, plus handle the default case where no tags are present, it may be general enough and useful for some.