Show Icon For Window Walking

[BenConstable9]

Summary of the new feature/enhancement

When using power toys run, the open windows should have their icon shown instead of the same icon for all open windows. See below where Edge has icon for an application which is not running but no icon for the open one.

[crutkas]

@betsegaw what are your thoughts here? I think we need to make it very clear it is a running process.

thumbnail? I know you did a lot more thinking about this.

[BenConstable9]

@betsegaw what are your thoughts here? I think we need to make it very clear it is a running process.

thumbnail? I know you did a lot more thinking about this.

Realise you want to keep the running applications separate from the others. Maybe split the dropdown into segments like Spotlight search with a section for running applications (with their icons), one for applications on the system and files?

[crutkas]

@BenConstable9 this is actually the type of feedback we are heavily interested in. single master list versus plugins each having their own

[betsegaw]

@crutkas - thumbnails would be one choice though I wonder how much info a thumbnail of that size would show?

One other option I have thought of is using the icon of the running app with a bold outline and some sort of glow (think Instagram profiles vs one's with stories) to provide distinction between running windows vs. launch windows.

I kind of like the above option since it unifies the experience of both launch and switch by highlighting which ones would be launched and which ones would be switched to at a glance.

[betsegaw]

To make it clear, here is the profile distinction I see in Instagram,

vs.

Had to red out the profile pic on the second one since it is not my profile but you get the difference. The outline (with some slight glow) would make it easy to distinguish which one is which + we would be able to use the apps own icon.

[crutkas]

I like the glow idea! Maybe we do an overlay of "Running" like Edge does for dev branch?

[Jay-o-Way]

What about using buttons on icons? Like OneDrive and Dropbox create buttons on icons. We could create a button for "app" , "file", "web" and who knows what more.

[BenConstable9]

I like the glow idea! Maybe we do an overlay of "Running" like Edge does for dev branch?

@crutkas Once it is decided what is happening, can I take it to do as a good first issue if I can figure out what to change?

[BenConstable9]

I've tried to make a change to fix this issue but come into an issue. With the object result which is passed back to the launcher, for UWP apps, there is a field called Icon which will accept an ImageSource as the parameter but for the WindowWalker result, if I change IcoPath to Icon and try and return a ImageSource rather than a Image URI, I get a compilation error.

Am I missing something obvious as both result objects use the Wox Result class?

For UWP
var result = new Result { SubTitle = "Packaged application", Icon = Logo, Score = score, ContextData = this, Action = e => { Launch(api); return true; } };

For WindowWalker

return _results.Select(x => new Result() { Title = x.Result.Title, IcoPath = IcoPath, SubTitle = "Running: " + x.Result.ProcessName, Action = c => { x.Result.SwitchToWindow(); return true; } } ).ToList();

[MartinLichtblau]

Since icons itself are diverse and colorful, I doubt that a simple transformation is consistently leading to the desired outcome, that is to tell the different types of entries apart. And what about other types of entries, that might come up in the future, like recently closed items (history) or tabs.

My feeling is that dividers are better, so that all entries of the same type are aggregated together. Furthermore when I search I know whether I look for an open app or want to launch a new one, so a prefix symbol should work too, e.g. one whitespace to launch, two for history, ...
Overall, users request to see running apps first, like in #3169 . So, show runnings apps on top, thereby having an implicit divider, and this issue here might just become obsolete 😉

What certainly shouldn't happen is that all running apps receive the same icon like seen here.

If you stick with icons, I suggest using sth. like the Windows loading circle to intuitively indicate the running property.

[crutkas]

we did update this, not perfect but

[crutkas]

viewing this as done for now

[andrew-shc]

Is there an option to disable this? I'm using this as an alt-tab replacement and would be awesome if the app icon can be shown again on running processes.

[roberto-gigli]

Can an option to display icons for windows walking be added? It is a bit difficult to recognize what apps are open at a glance