Can you start working/typing in a miniview window or is it preview only?

[parrotcar00]

I had a couple of terminals that I want to keep in front of me. Using miniview I can see a preview window for each terminal.

1. Is it possible to keep more than 1 miniview preview on my monitor?
2. Is it possible to click inside of a preview window and say, start typing commands in the terminal preview window?

[iamlemec]

I think (1) would be theoretically possible, however it would require a good bit of work to make sure things work well. My worry is that it would overcomplicate the usual use case of just one miniview window.

I guess you could have a multi-window mode, where the miniview keybinding (Shift+F12 by default) adds a new miniview window and there is some mouse command (such as Ctrl+LeftClick) that destroys a given miniview window.

As for (2), that would be tough from a technical standpoint. It would of course be super cool, but I don't know enough about the internals of mutter events to really say if it's possible or not. The best we have right now is double clicking on the miniview window to focus the underlying window itself.

[parrotcar00]

Thinking a little more about use-case #1, I'm thinking of it like another way to resize existing windows. So right now, if you have an application window that you resize, the resize operation actually reduces the number of available pixels that the app can be rendered to.

I'm thinking adding miniview like functionality as a secondary way to resize app windows, let's call it mode-2 resize.

So if you let's say shrink a window in a mode-2 resize way, what will happen is that the window will simply look like a preview window and not have its number pixels reduced. Basically, this would help us make use of our super high resolution displays and fractional rendering support that gnome has gotten. We can start "zooming" in and out of app windows on the same monitor.

It would be a new way to implement tiling window manager functionality. Once this use case #1, starts working, one would want to implement #2 to also to go with this as doing work in app windows seems to be a good fit for this functionality.