Suggestion: CDE style minimizing to desktop

[Jordan Mendler <jmendler ucla edu>]

I had a suggestion, but I am not sure if this is a correct place to post
it, so please let me know if it isn't. I think GNOME should integrate
the ability to minimize windows to a desktop icon as is the case with
CDE. I like GNOME a lot better than any other desktop environment,
except when it comes to managing lots of servers I use CDE solely
because of this feature. For those that haven't used CDE, by clicking a
button on a windows title bar's (located in the top right next to
maximize), CDE will minimize the window to a desktop icon. Then to
restore the window you just double-click the respective window's icon
from the desktop. This is very useful because it allows you to have tons
of programs open and easily accessible without occupying monitor space
like with the gnome-panel. In my case, I keep an ssh session open to
every server we have. When I am not using a particular server I just
minimize the terminal to an icon on the desktop and it is completely out
of the way. When I need to access any given system I just go to the
desktop and can very easily locate and open whichever server I need.

Unfortunately I do not know how to program so I can't do this myself,
but I thought it would be a really neat and useful feature to be
considered in subsequent GNOME releases, or possible as an add-on. If
GNOME added at 4th button to the top-right of each windows so you can
either exit, maximize/restore windows size, minimize to panel, or
minimize to desktop I think that would be pretty unique and bad ass. At
work, I know of at least 2 other administrators that use CDE over GNOME
for this reason alone. Of course this also means having to have a second
workstation running GNOME for all my non-terminal needs since CDE is
otherwise pretty lousy. If GNOME had this feature I could very easily
have a panel open for email, web, documents, etc and then just keep all
the ssh sessions minimized to the desktop of the same system.

Please post any comments or thoughts on this matter. Or, if something
like this already exists as an add-on or option somewhere please let me
know. I would be imagine there are a lot of other people that have run
into this same kind of problem with GNOME, KDE and the like.

Jordan