[FR/RFC] makes the workspace overview searchable

wiiznokes commented 2 months ago

I think the workspace overview should be searchable, like in Gnome and Kde, and this should be the default super key on cosmic. I will try my best to describe why in this issue.

note: I will use "overview" for "workspace overview", and "launcher" for "cosmic-launcher".

First, let's compare the two without the search feature

The overview is useful for many things

manage workspace (switch, remove, create, switch windows between workspace)
see opened windows
focus an opened window

The cosmic-launcher, without the search, does the same thing: it shows open windows and allows you to focus one of them. I think the overview does a better jobs for this because

it take advantage of the screen space
it is more visual, the content of windows are visible, which makes it easier to identify the window you want to focus.
The animation from idle to overview can be really beautiful (Gnome (now also kde)), and is useful to identify windows
the wanted window can be selected faster, because the overview use a grid, while the launcher use a list

Now with the search feature, if we compare the launcher and, for example, Gnome overview, they share basically the same features. Except that the overview does again a better job because

it take advantage of the screen space
use some sort of enhanced grid which is faster than a list
use different UI components or behavior to optimize things[^1].

Overall, we could merge the launcher in the overview, without losing features, with the benefit of losing one shortcut, which is alway good for discoverability and convenience (ex Google and his one text field to search everything).

[^1]: ex: on Gnome, the first row is application icons. A background color is used to indicate if an app is already opened. You can use ctrl+enter to open a new instance. On kde, the search will first filter windows, and then show a list of results if no opened windows match.