Force minimize (kill) !?

[JePP]

I've always wondered why it appears to not be possible to force-minimize any application. A lot of apps are unpolished and thus tend to freeze, hang, crash etc. and pressing and holding the Pandora button might force the app-kill window to open in the background (when lucky), but it's not possible to access it! Sometimes I even end up being "transported" to the xfce desktop - in the background while the frozen app is still running - and i end up pressing enter several times out of frustration, which leads up to other apps being launched in the background ... general mayhem & madness!

Anyway, all too often the only solution is to force reset (pandora button + switch), though all I want to do is minimize / kill the app I'm running.

So, am I missing something? Is there any way to force minimize / kill ? If not: why not? Is it technically somehow impossible to code?

Thanks!

 

[TrashyMG]

There is a Kill command with the Pandora button.. you hold it for several seconds and a pop-up will show..  it may not show if the game uses the framebuffer, which a good majority do.. but you can do it blindly if you hold the Pandora button down wait a few seconds, then hit the down arrow once to select the program and hit enter it will kill it..

I agree that It's something that should be improved.

 

[Binky]

How about short press to minimise, medium length press to bring up menu, long press to kill ?

 

[TrashyMG]

^ Well I don't like the idea of short presses. in the dark I always hit that button by accident. If ctrl/shift/alt combos could be used that would be great.

 

[Binky]

All longish presses:

pandora --> minimise

ctrl + pandora --> menu

Ctrl + alt + pandora --> ask pnd to close

alt + pandora --> kill

That way difficulty to press correlates with viciousness of action.

 

[WizardStan]

It's not really possible to "minimize" anything using the framebuffer. You can hide it, but the application in question has usually grabbed the mouse and keyboard so you'd just end up clicking at things on your desktop which is actually just sending clicks through to the application has the devices. I seem to recall this as one of the unfortunate side effects of Notaz's improved SDL.

 

[Binky]

Can't root / sudo grab the screen/keyboard back again?

 

[JePP]

It's not really possible to "minimize" anything using the framebuffer. You can hide it, but the application in question has usually grabbed the mouse and keyboard so you'd just end up clicking at things on your desktop which is actually just sending clicks through to the application has the devices. I seem to recall this as one of the unfortunate side effects of Notaz's improved SDL.

That is exactly what I meant, I'm fully aware of the Pandora button combos, but they won't work with the used framebuffer apparently.

It seems a bit crazy that the one thing the can-do-it-all multi-functional Pandora cannot do, is simply minimize or force-kill a lot of applications.  :mellow:

 

[TrashyMG]

^ It's not that it can't, it's just that someone would have to develop a solution to do so..

And like I said in my first post.. the kill menu works if you know how to do it blindly.. it's just hidden behind the framebuffer output.

 

[WizardStan]

Can't root / sudo grab the screen/keyboard back again?

Yes, and I toyed with it when I was writing that ugly hack of a popup for that one contest. It's possible for another application (ie, the popup I wrote) to grab them but I could never figure out how to generally release so the desktop or other non-root applications could be used normally.

 

[Askarus]

Why do we have this Pandora button menu?

I'd like to open up the xfce4-taskmanager instead of that window.