See all accordion windows instead of only adjacent ones

[dfl0]

The Basic Idea

It's nice to use the accordion layout as it largely increases the space you have for the current application, while also maintaining some context about the rest of the workspace. However, I think it might be nice to have the option to see just a little more context.

Sometimes, when I have to switch to a window that isn't directly to the left/right or top/bottom in my accordion layout, I find myself having to think briefly about where one of my windows is in the whole stack. I use accordion a lot with just two windows at a time, since it's super convenient moving back and forth between them when knowing all the open windows and where they are in relation to each other without losing a lot of screen space. I feel like it could be beneficial to, similarly, be able to see the entire context of the accordion layout with more windows in it as well.

So what I was thinking was either an option to use the accordion layout "expanded" (if that word makes sense here) or having a separate layout kind that's less stacked and more (in my mind) accordion-like. This would modify the default behavior of the accordion from showing just the one adjacent window on either side of the focused window with $\text{accordion-padding}$ size to, instead, show all $x$ windows in one direction and $y$ windows in the other, each having $\text{accordion-padding}$ size (i.e. the focused window would have a $x \cdot \text{accordion-padding}$ sized gap on one side, and a $y \cdot \text{accordion-padding}$ sized gap on the other). To me, the option (as opposed to a new, separate layout) feels like it would fit in better with all of Aerospace's current features and philosophy, with something along the lines of an accordion-style config option which can be stacked (current default) or expanded (or better fitting words).

Argument Against This

I see how with an absurd amount of windows this would cause the focused window to get smaller and smaller and shift more in one direction than the other due to the gap on either side being dependent on the number of windows. Whereas with the way it works now, the focused window always has the same size and position, irrespective of the how many windows on either side.

At the same time, though, I rarely have more than 3 maybe 4 windows open in the same workspace as I think that (arguably) wouldn't be a very effective use of a window manager like Aerospace. I believe that for a reasonable number of windows, these things aren't really an issue. I find that the benefit of having the focused window stay the same "maximum" size in the accordion layout is diminished by making the sacrifice of not seeing the entire workspace's context -- with the current way accordion works, if I am prioritizing screen space I'd rather just make the window fullscreen (i.e., maximize, not native) since I can't see any of my other apps in accordion anyways, then un-fullscreen when I want to move to another window, eliminating that niche in which the accordion layout would be useful.

What I've Tried

The closest I was able to mimic this behavior and layout was by turning off the automatic container flattening by disabling enable-normalization-flatten-containers so that I can have a container with just one window, and another container with lets say two windows, both in the root container. If I make the layout of both the root container and the container with two windows accordion, then both accordion-padding's are seen like how I described -- though this is the case only when a specific window is focused and only in one of the directions, so this isn't actually a solution, but rather just my "prototyping" of how the layout would look in a certain instance.

TL;DR

In short, it would be useful to have the choice to see a bit of all windows in either direction of the focused window in the accordion layout, rather than just being able see that there are windows in either direction.

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I hope everything made sense, and that I explained the idea and it's utility decently. Would any of you use this? Do you think that this would be a reasonable/useful feature?

Thanks!

[nikitabobko]

Wouldn't smth like this #24 resolve your problem?

[dfl0]

You mean having the indicators on the side of a stack right? I did see that idea and it would, in fact, give more context in terms of seeing the indication of all windows and positioning of the active one. Though, I think that:

1. This is still hiding some of the context which would be convenient like quickly seeing what/where the windows actually are (by seeing a small part of it).
2. Wouldn't this be dependent on having an outer padding for the stack where the indicators could fit to be displayed?
3. It seems like it would require much more effort to implement something like that, as you mentioned.