Child windows cannot be minimized
Submitted by Hugues De Keyzer
Assigned to Olivier Fourdan @olivier
Description
Created attachment 8163 child windows test case
When an application has child windows, those appear in the Window Buttons and can be switched to with Alt+Tab, but they cannot be minimized (actually they can, but it behaves strangely, more on this later). They have no minimize button. In other window managers (Metacity and KWin for example), child windows behave almost like normal windows. The only thing that cannot be done is put them behind their parent window (and this is expected, I think, and works already correctly in xfwm4).
It is nevertheless somehow possible to minimize child windows. When the button of a focused child window is clicked in the Window Buttons, the child window is minimized. But when another child window (or the parent window) is selected by using the Window Buttons or by switching to it with Alt+Tab, the minimized window is restored.
I think that similarly to Metacity and KWin (and probably other window managers), xfwm4 should allow to minimize child windows as other windows. They should have a minimize button. Minimizing a window should minimize all its child windows (it already behaves like this), and restoring a window should do exactly the opposite operation. This means that if any of its child windows was minimized before its parent was minimized, that child window should not be restored when its parent is restored.
Not being able to minimize child windows makes it cumbersome to work with application that have many child windows.
A test case is attached to this bug. It creates a main window with 3 child windows. It uses Python 3 and PyQt 5.
I’m willing to fix it myself, but I have no idea in which file this is handled. If someone could give me a clue, it would be great.
Attachment 8163, "child windows test case":
child_windows_test.py
Version: 4.12.0