Chrome-Like "Pin Tab" Feature For Gnome Window List

Window List is a Gnome Panel applet - the default way to view the list of all windows that are currently running in Gnome. Normally, the opened windows are displayed like this:

We've already seen a couple of ways to only display icons on the Gnome Panel for the running applications (by using Talika and DockBarX), but Kevin Mehall has a different approach: by using a behavior similar to the Google Chrome "Pin Tab" feature (which is also available as an extension for Firefox by the way), meaning that the "pinned" windows are all grouped to the left and only their icons are displayed, while the unpinned windows are displayed on the right of the pinned windows, and both the icon and the window title are displayed:

To install Kevin's "hack" in Ubuntu, run the following commands in a terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kevin-mehall/libwnck
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install libwnck22

And then restart the Gnome Panel:

killall gnome-panel

Then, right click a window in the "Window List" on your Gnome Panel and select "Always on visible workspace". That will "pin" the window to the taskbar (Gnome Panel).

The "pinned" windows will be displayed on all the workspaces, just like the Notification Area applications.

I have noticed a bug though: after pinning a few windows, the windows left unpinned take the whole space left on the Gnome Panel, unless you have some other applet to the right of the Window List. So if you only have 1-2 windows unpinned, they will be huge. Adding an applet to the right of the Window List can fix this by moving this applet more to the left, to adjust the Window List size.

More info (and credits for this "Pin tab" feature), on Kevin Mehall's blog.