Kill the 'drag off the dock to remove launcher' feature

[harveycabaguio]

Prerequisites

• I have searched open and closed issues for duplicates.

Describe the bug

If intention of the dock is to hold the user's most used apps, it seems kinda unnecessary to have a feature that makes it easy/error-prone to remove them from the dock. And for something that's easy to do, there's no easy way to undo the action.

More interesting things could be done here, something like the split view in iPad OS where you can drag the launcher from the dock to the desired area to open it tiled, or even something simple like dragging up to reveal the context menu like in Windows.

Platform Information

• I'm using the latest version from git that I've manually compiled
• I'm using the latest released stable version

[danirabbit]

Yeah I think I agree that dragging to launch into a tile is way more interesting and useful

[cassidyjames]

Android also has a solution to dragging to move vs dragging to remove: we could have a drop target to remove an app if we really want to make it something we can do with a drag. I.e. add a space at the end of the dock with a trash can or an x, and dragging there would remove the app.

[gforceg]

For me, "drag to remove" seems very intuitive. Are you all open to this being a user preference?

[4jNsY6fCVqZv]

I would definitely support a solution that makes it more difficult to remove apps from the dock accidentally and unmindful. Happens to me a lot in a hurry. As long as the app is still open, you will not notice that you have removed it. Simply because I didn't see the animation or which app I got in the rush. This does not mean that I cannot do something myself so that I am more concentrated and it happens less often ;)
On the other hand, it shouldn't get so complicated that people no longer intuitively understand how to remove apps from the dock. Does it make sense to orientate oneself towards mobile operating systems here, because users usually have more everyday experience with them?
And how can we find out whether there is a need for improvement or whether the current solution already works well enough? For example in terms of accessibility.

[Blast-City]

It would be cool to do something similar to elementary/gala#569

• Dragging the icon on the desktop would open in the current workspace
• Dragging on one of the sides would open tiled on the current workspace
• Dragging on the top would open maximized on the current workspace
• Dragging the icon to the bottom would open workspace overview and you could drag the application on other workspaces.

[felix-andreas]

I started working on an implementation which uses elementary/gala#595 to tile the application.

Once the an app-icon is dragged outside dock, plank notifies gala via DBus to display the tile-preview.

I am not sure if this is the right approach, because it would mean, that this feature would be limited to gala and does not work with other WMs.

One current issue is that I was not able to figure out how update the tile-preview when the cursor position changes. I thought, I could listen to the cursor_moved event of the Meta.CursorTracker. But I do not get it to emit any signals... Maybe someone knows the solution here? A problem is that the Meta.CursorTracker is not documented in the most recent mutter manual. I am not even sure if the cursor_moved signal is supposed to be emitted when the cursor position changes or if it has a different purpose 😅

[MauricioGlz]

I must disagree on this request, removing an icon app should be intuitive and what more intuitive than just moving it outside of the dock. Yes there is no "easy way" to undo the change, but this can't be done accidentally it requires the user to do:

• Click on the icon
• Hold click
• Move mouse up or diagonally outside dock.

Having to do extra steps to remove an icon I think it's unnecessary.

[ChristopherTheBoss]

Right click + drag off dock to remove?

[ChildishGiant]

If I ever want to remove something from the dock I just right click and untick "keep in dock". I have, however, been playing a game (etc) and accidentally dragged something off of the dock.