Feature Request: Redesign and repurpose the Applications tab to allow customizing per application notification settings
I understand there may not be enough people to work on this or if this appears to be overcomplicating the simple nature of what this may supposed to be and introducing bloat, but it would be neat to be able to configure the behavior, appearance (including disappear after amount), and animations for each registered application as well as to be able to see a preview for each. Essentially, most to all the settings and buttons in the General tab except do not disturb. Do not disturb wouldn’t be included because I can see confusion whether it is blocked or not and how do not disturb function could be viewed redundant with that. Perhaps the block designation for the toggles could change to do not disturb. I don't know a desktop that has this level of granularity for notifications. A couple of ways I think this could work:
- The block/allow toggles in the Applications tab remains as it is, but clicking a row causes a panel of options to lower/extend/appear below the row instead of toggling. It’s all the settings and labels except do not disturb in the General tab, but compressed with labels on top instead of on the side to not take so much room to block too many other applications from view. Clicking the row again would hide the panel. Only one panel can be extended at a time e.g. application 1’s row is clicked and panel appears and application 2’s row is clicked the panel under application 1’s row goes away and appears under application 2’s row. One thing that I can see may be annoying with this, assuming it can be compressed, is that someone scrolling may accidentally put their mouse over the combination boxes, slider, etc... and change it to a value they don’t want. It could get as bad as pavucontrol, but I’m not sure how unavoidable it is with current GTK.
- The block/allow toggles in the Applications tab remains as it is, but clicking row doesn’t toggle and there is a button for settings that opens a separate window with all the relevant settings and buttons in it. Multiple setting windows could be open at once and the windows would have clear labeling and icons to make it easy to distinguish them.
- The block/allow toggles in the Application tab moves closer to the application name, clicking a row doesn’t toggle, and there is a separator between toggle and a grey area that populates with the settings when each application is clicked similar to the way KDE does it, but in a way that fits in the current default window size. I imagine a scroll bar would be necessary if trying to fill the grey area and I would find that annoying if the form controls (combination boxes, slider, etc...) were to be included into the area for the same burdens as explained in 1.
In every case there would be some icon or indicator on each row indicating if settings were changed. The default application notification setting values mirror the values in the General tab at the time each application notification setting is viewed and mirror every subsequent time they are viewed and not modified. To be clear, if only one setting was changed for an application, the rest of the unmodified settings would mirror the corresponding setting in the General tab. Changes to individual application notification settings would take precedence over the General tab by default. There would be an additional setting in the General tab under Behavior that toggles the settings in General tab taking precedence over the individual application notification settings and would be off by default. This toggle wouldn’t be viewed in individual application settings. Individual application settings would have a button to reset to default settings which means the current settings in the General tab are mirrored.
I dislike the GTK behavior where slider and combo box values can be changed if mouse cursor happens to be near or over them if also scrolling page. This has been reported here https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3092 and my grievances can be summed up there. It looks like there is a merge request that fixes the issue and is getting some form of attention here https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/4405. I just want to point out this issue exists while the fix is still not merged and it would be nice if the issue was taken into account in the design process.
For this reason, I would prefer 2 > 1 > 3. I would prefer 1 if the scrolling easily accidentally changing values wasn’t a problem and I think it would be useful and intuitive and interesting and this is also why it is not below 3. I think more settings being added in the future and extensibility needs to be considered and I prefer 2 > 3 > 1 for this criteria if it matters to other people.
I am interested in thoughts.