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Expocity - efficient application switching

Metacity Window Manager
Metacity Window Manager

expocity is an effort to integrate an efficient means of switching between applications into the window manager metacity. After pressing a keystroke, your window manager will present you a complete overview of all open windows and you can select the window, you want to switch to, visually.
You no longer have to search a too full taskbar or the tablist for the right window. Just point at it.

Everybody is talking about such a feature and that it would require the new freedesktop.org X-Server... well, expocity is an extension for metacity enabling this on a standard X-Server!

More info and a screenshot can be found
here.

If you want to try it out yourself, get the patch from
here and apply it to the current CVS version of metacity.

Have fun! .... Martin Grimme

Apparently not just a hack

This patch runs with reasonable performance on a Celeron 1300, don't really know how much memory it eats though. I really hope it makes its way to CVS... It works very nice, is sweet eyecandy (though not up to apple's expose), and even looks functional...

Brief installation tutorial (warning, may break your installation... It should install in /usr/local but who knows... Could also break gconf keys maybe? on my FC1 it worked, but I didn't try to uninstall yet. Also, it may require some GNOME devel packages, but nothing you can't find as RPM on fedora's repositories):

downlaod the patch file (expocity-11-24-03.diff) in a new directory, say /home/you/meta

cd /home/you/meta

export CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.gnome.org:/cvs/gnome

cvs login

cvs -z3 co metacity

patch -p0 < expocity-11-24-03.diff

cd metacity

./autogen.sh

make

(as root:) make install

metacity --replace

press ALT-TAB and enjoy a lot