Lo Zeno
July 9th, 2025, 14:47
Link to Feature Request (https://www.fantasygrounds.com/featurerequests/featurerequests.php?titlesearch=Minimise%20windows %20to%20a%20%22toolbar%22%20in%20the%20V)
This is admittedly not a very high priority thing to request, but it's an idea to improve the usability and familiarity of FGU, which has value.
Several times my players have pointed out that the way "minimising" windows works in FGU is not very user friendly, the reason being that the white bubbles it creates are hard to see against other pictures (e.g. if the original window was floating above a sepia-colored map, as is common when playing D&D 5E published modules), and the icons are not enough to identify quickly WHAT each minimised bubble represent - each icon represent a window category, e.g. Module, Image, Character, Spell, etc but the same icon is often reused for multiple categories (e.g. Spell, Feat, Class and Module all use the same icon of a stack of books, PC and NPC all use a white skull...). Another problem is that when minimising a window for the first time it makes the bubble float at the point that corresponded to the top left corner of the window, meaning that minimised bubbles are first "scattered"; after the first time, instead, they retain the memory of where they were positioned the first time.
One way that would make it better would be if they behaved more like Windows' Taskbar, or, perhaps more appropriate for FGU, like MacOS's dockbar:
https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=64773&stc=1&d=1752068092
AKA, a lock-able area, similar to the one used for dice, where the bubbles would appear when a window gets minimised the first time. In this area the bubbles would appear sequentially, for simplicity (the leftmost bubble is the one that was minimised first, the second was minimised second, and the rightmost bubble would be the last window to have been minimised).
Ideally, when possible the bubbles would not use the white default icons but would use more meaningful pictures, for example when it's a reference book it could use the icon that's already used for the module in the Modules window, a map could use an icon derived from the map itself, characters and NPCs could use the Token image as bubble icon:
https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=64774&stc=1&d=1752068298
And, again ideally, when a bubble is un-minimised to its full window, the "dockbar" would rearrange the icons to avoid leaving blank spaces in the row of bubbles:
https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=64775&stc=1&d=1752068476
What would be the point of this redesign?
The fact is that people have gotten used to how minimising windows work in the main OSes (Windows, Mac, KDE and Gnome on Linux) where they more or less work the same way, with minor differences. Windows 8, back in the day, proved that changing paradigm on this is hard and is met with hostility by the users. IMHO, the way FGU handles minimising windows is more confusing than useful, and leads to wasting time to rearrange the bubbles, which might not sound like a big deal but when DMing with lots and lots of windows to open and close it's actually fairly annoying. A default bar with meaningful icons would make things predictable, organised, clean, and easy to use.
Obviously, a full-fledged dock/taskbar would be a lot more complicated and feature-rich than what I described, but I think that this would be already a great step forward. And even more obviously, this is not directly related to running an RPG so it probably looks like a very low-priority thing to ask, still I think it would be valuable.
64773
This is admittedly not a very high priority thing to request, but it's an idea to improve the usability and familiarity of FGU, which has value.
Several times my players have pointed out that the way "minimising" windows works in FGU is not very user friendly, the reason being that the white bubbles it creates are hard to see against other pictures (e.g. if the original window was floating above a sepia-colored map, as is common when playing D&D 5E published modules), and the icons are not enough to identify quickly WHAT each minimised bubble represent - each icon represent a window category, e.g. Module, Image, Character, Spell, etc but the same icon is often reused for multiple categories (e.g. Spell, Feat, Class and Module all use the same icon of a stack of books, PC and NPC all use a white skull...). Another problem is that when minimising a window for the first time it makes the bubble float at the point that corresponded to the top left corner of the window, meaning that minimised bubbles are first "scattered"; after the first time, instead, they retain the memory of where they were positioned the first time.
One way that would make it better would be if they behaved more like Windows' Taskbar, or, perhaps more appropriate for FGU, like MacOS's dockbar:
https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=64773&stc=1&d=1752068092
AKA, a lock-able area, similar to the one used for dice, where the bubbles would appear when a window gets minimised the first time. In this area the bubbles would appear sequentially, for simplicity (the leftmost bubble is the one that was minimised first, the second was minimised second, and the rightmost bubble would be the last window to have been minimised).
Ideally, when possible the bubbles would not use the white default icons but would use more meaningful pictures, for example when it's a reference book it could use the icon that's already used for the module in the Modules window, a map could use an icon derived from the map itself, characters and NPCs could use the Token image as bubble icon:
https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=64774&stc=1&d=1752068298
And, again ideally, when a bubble is un-minimised to its full window, the "dockbar" would rearrange the icons to avoid leaving blank spaces in the row of bubbles:
https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=64775&stc=1&d=1752068476
What would be the point of this redesign?
The fact is that people have gotten used to how minimising windows work in the main OSes (Windows, Mac, KDE and Gnome on Linux) where they more or less work the same way, with minor differences. Windows 8, back in the day, proved that changing paradigm on this is hard and is met with hostility by the users. IMHO, the way FGU handles minimising windows is more confusing than useful, and leads to wasting time to rearrange the bubbles, which might not sound like a big deal but when DMing with lots and lots of windows to open and close it's actually fairly annoying. A default bar with meaningful icons would make things predictable, organised, clean, and easy to use.
Obviously, a full-fledged dock/taskbar would be a lot more complicated and feature-rich than what I described, but I think that this would be already a great step forward. And even more obviously, this is not directly related to running an RPG so it probably looks like a very low-priority thing to ask, still I think it would be valuable.
64773