List of open windows has disappeared ?

[sebchang]

Hi I've been using Audacity for some time now, and just upgraded from 2.1.0 to 2.2.x

I saw a few minor bugs in 2.2.0 but they have already been fixed in 2.2.1 so... so far so good !
I'm wondering though why the list of open windows does not appear in the "Window" menu anymore ? It was useful to me to cycle through the various tracks I'm working on.

Do you plan on bringing this back ? Or is it somewhere else that I didn't find ?
Thanks guys and keep up the good work !

[steve]

I'm wondering though why the list of open windows does not appear in the "Window" menu anymore ?

I'm not a Mac guy, but think that's due to Apple changing things in macOS.

[sebchang]

Are you still seeing it on windows build ?

[waxcylinder]

Are you still seeing it on windows build ?

It's a Mac feature not an Audacity feature - so Windows has no such Menu.

If you want it changed you'll need to write to Apple ...

WC

[sebchang]

Well... I'm not really convinced by this explanation :

In macOS you can display one application's open windows, I think it was called expose, see "Expose - Audacity" screenshot, there are 2 windows opened.
From Audactiy > Window, none are listed, see "Window - Audacity" screenshot

I tried to do the same in Chrome, 2 windows appear in expose, and 2 windows are listed in the menu, see "Window - Chrome" screenshot.
In Adobe Premiere CC, it's a bit different, I only have 1 actual window in expose, which consists in multiple "panels". From the menu entry I see a lot of items, the ones with checkmarks are panels currently displayed, the others are panels you can choose to display.

Bottom line is, this "Window" menu entry behavior does not seem to be a macOS thing. Or at least it is not behaving the same from 1 application to another, which means there's probably something to do in audacity code to "declare" the windows that should be listed in this menu. Maybe something changed for this menu and Audacity did not adapt to this modification.
I didn't report this as a bug as it seemed too "obvious" to be one, but I'm not so sure anymore, maybe I should file a bug ?

Window - Audacity.png (36.59 KiB) Viewed 1185 times

Window - Chrome.png (198.2 KiB) Viewed 1185 times

Window - premiere.png (275.6 KiB) Viewed 1185 times

Expose - Audacity.jpg (546.63 KiB) Viewed 1185 times

[steve]

Bottom line is, this "Window" menu entry behavior does not seem to be a macOS thing.

It's not our place to "convince you", but neither Windows or Linux have a "Mac menu bar" at the top of the desktop. That's a feature unique to Mac operating systems. The Sierra version is described here: https://support.apple.com/kb/PH25077?locale=en_GB

By default, Ubuntu has a menu at the top of the desktop, which is visually similar to the Mac menu bar, but has some different features.
Other versions of Linux have various forms of "panels" at one or more edges of the desktop, or none at all.
Windows has a "Taskbar" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taskbar

Or at least it is not behaving the same from 1 application to another

That's correct.

If you want it changed you'll need to write to Apple ...

I've checked, and that's not quite correct.
The issue is that macOS does not automatically add a "Window" menu for applications built with Wx3. Audacity upgraded from Wx2.8 to Wx3.0 a few years ago, and so lost the "Window" menu altogether. This was mitigated by changing the code in Audacity to manually add a Window menu that at least brings back some of the functionality of the old Window menu.

One might reasonably assume that the Mac operating system would automatically have consistent menus for all applications, but that's not the case, and that is entirely in the hands of Apple.

The fact that Wx3 applications don't produce a "Window" menu is logged on the WxWidgets bug tracker as a bug. That's an issue for WxWidgets. (issue #14351)

The fact that we don't have a fully satisfactory workaround for the above is an "Audacity issue" and is logged on the Audacity bug tracker (bug 1119)

[waxcylinder]

And I've just noticed my last useful comment in this context in that bug thread where I wrote:


More usefully, if you right click on the Audacity icon in the Task bar at the bottom of the Mac screen, you can then select "Show All Windows". This will display all open Audacity project windows enabling to choose any one by clicking it.

So there's a good workaround

Full bug thread: http://bugzilla.audacityteam.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1119

WC

[sebchang]

Hi, thanks for all the details.
What I meant by "it's not a macOS thing" was that it's not a macOS bug that Audacity is not displaying its windows in this menu. Sorry if it wasn't clear enough, but now we're on the same page I think.

I did try to look for a bug related to list of windows but couldn't find it. Thanks for the link, that's exactly it. I see it was closed and reopened as people seem to like having this list of windows so hopefully it will be fixed someday.

PS: About the workaround I'll have a look, I'm not home right now and I don't remember what the "show all windows" does. But if it's the same as the expose thing it will not be useful to me unfortunately, as I already have my topright hot corner dedicated to displaying "application windows" and it's not as easy to pick the one you want from 10 thumbnail as it was when selecting a text entry in the menu. Anyway now that I know the issue is already known of and logged in your database, I'll just use my workaround or yours and live with it

Thanks again for the explanations.