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rittaarier

Expocity - efficient application switching

Submitted by pycage on Mon, 2003-11-24 15:41. 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

Re: Apparently not just a hack

Submitted by Daniel Borgmann on Tue, 2003-11-25 05:36.

Well, it seems to keep the thumbnails for all windows around all the time and updates them whenever they change.

Maybe that isn't too much of an issue in terms of memory usage, but it's still a hack and especially a performance issue as many have already pointed out. Especially bringing a hidden window to the front seems to take much much longer.

Another problem is, that it doesn't really move the windows, it just hides the windows and then moves the thumbnails in. While this looks rather cool, it makes no sense whatsoever. The only real purpose of moving windows around would be, that you don't lose "track" of them after you press alt+tab, which obviously doesn't work if they vanish and then appear from "the off". Thus it's only a slowdown, the kind of visual gimmick that Unix users tend to make fun of (and right they are). :)

The main reason why I don't think that this will ever get into Metacity CVS is, that it will be completely obsoleted by the work on the new Xserver. As the compositing manager will keep the contents of each window in memory anyway, there is no overhead in updating thumbnails. Also it would be trivial to make the compositing manager move and scale the "real" windows into another place, instead of hiding them and using those "fake" windows. This wouldn't just look much cooler, it would also be actually useful.

In fact, work on expose-like functionality (they seem to call it "uncover") seems to have started already, as shown on this screenshot from the freedesktop article on OSNews:

http://img.osnews.com/img/5215/x-expose.png

Don't get me wrong, I actually like the patch and I plan on using it until I get sick of the slowness. =) But considering that Havoc refused to do any kind of visual hackery in Metacity so far, I doubt that it will get in officially.

And this new X server is just making me drool. :) I wish it would work for me.

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