No easy way to bring back contact list when using the Shell
Submitted by Guillaume Desmottes
Link to original bug (#658043)
Description
How things work
Empathy is split in different process:
- empathy: the contact list
- empathy-chat: the chat windows
- empathy-av / empathy-call: audio/video calls
- empathy-accoutns : the accounts dialog
- empathy-debugger : the debug dialog
- empathy-auth-client : small client used when connecting to IM accounts to provide the password, ask for certificate exceptions, etc.
Atm, all these process do this when starting: gdk_set_program_class ("Empathy"); gtk_window_set_default_icon_name ("empathy");
The goal here is to appear as the same application in the Shell (same entry in Alt-Tab and in the menu bar in the overview): bug #642440
The problem
When user closes the empathy contact list window he doesn't have an easy way to bring it back. It use to be able to by clicking on the status icon but it has been removed (bug #631944). Clicking on the Empathy icon in the menu brings back the chat windows (empathy-chat), it doesn't popup the contact list.
We discussed this during our BoF at the DS and suggested to add a "Show contact list" item in the app menu but, afaik, we can't do that yet (bug #621203).
Another option could be to stop grouping empathy-* process as the same Shell app but that bring some problem:
- Each process should have its own icon to be quickly identifiable in the menus. Which icons would we use? We could maybe use the avatar of the currently active tab for empathy-chat but that doesn't solve the problem for the other processes.
- Some risk of menu entries explosion
Version: 2.33.x