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PikeNote / taskbar-groups-pike-beta

Lightweight application that lets users create and pin groups to the Windows taskbar och desktop
MIT License
126 stars 9 forks source link

[Feature request] Open applications only show up in its own group #27

Open ThinkSalat opened 1 year ago

ThinkSalat commented 1 year ago

Current behavior: Opening a shortcut from a taskbar group opens that application, creating taskbar icon outside of that group. Ideally, the icon would stay inside the group, and be accessible from there. The taskbar group should be the main place to interact with that application from the taskbar.

My personal use case: I have a benchmarks group. There are four applications in the group and I open all of them. Now there are four additional icons including the benchmark group icon. In effect this really just added one more icon to my taskbar as opposed to keeping it organized. The preferred behavior would be that the applications "live" inside the taskbar group and and interaction with the application would be handled within the group itself. So if I open cinbench, hwinfo, xtu and 3dmark, they'd all be in the benchmark group without additional icons cluttering the taskbar.

Additionally, showing the little dot underneath to specify if the application is open along with the longer dash to specify if the current application is active would be icing on the cake.

From my understanding of this app, it's really just a small window that pops up when you click on the taskbar icon. I'm not sure the work it'd take to reconfigure the taskbar groups to actually hold the taskbar icons as opposed to shortcuts of them, but that would be the ideal way this application would work.

PikeNote commented 1 year ago

I've gotten this feature request before, and it is definitely something I want to achieve. This may take some work, so I want to get everything fixed currently before I keep going.

One of the biggest challenges for me at the moment would be working with the Windows API. There is no native taskbar API that is easily useable I can drop in, unfortunately (will research more about it).

Technically, we can already stack all launched applications under the group shortcut, but it isn't exactly clean. It would still be using the same form to launch the applications, but the applications would all be grouped under the shortcut on the taskbar. My thought was to get to a point where the form is rendered as a thumbnail preview (when you hover over an application on the taskbar) if it has a running application. It would have the windows of the applications that are opened + the group to launch shortcuts.

Currently, I have no idea how to draw the form and push the thumbnail preview up to accommodate for it. The other part of that is to register the whole thing as a thumbnail so that the windows don't disappear when you say go over to the application. Definitely need help on this, so contributions/ideas are welcome.

Edit: Just to note as well, Bins which is the application that has these things heavily hacks into the Windows taskbar application. That implementation is most likely a no-go from me since I don't have the skills/knowledge to recreate that, and they are not supporting Windows 11, so I assume the methods that they used were removed/patched up in that.

JohnLGalt commented 1 year ago

Actually, I used BINS a lot in its heyday, and even worked with the developer to extend support to Windows 10 (through testing, not coding).

Windows 11 taskbar is so completely different, though, that BINS simply just doesn't execute the way it should, the last time that I checked. I still have the license I bought and the test licenses he sent to me for testing, and I can see if BINS works any better now that the Windows 11 taskbar seems to be making progress to try to handle things like pinned items and whatnot a bit better than launch last year.