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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: How Does it Work?

Submitted by thecombatwombat on Wed, 2003-11-26 02:47.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's it.

Having compiled it, yes it's pretty cool, but the recent freedesktop.org stuff will work better I think. All of your windows don't just pop into place, they all vanish and then slide in from off screen. They can't update when thumb-nailed and because only visible parts get updated on the thumbnails (or seem to in my 10 minutes of playing with it) sometimes there are dead spots.

Still cool stuff, hope to see a more proper version in the near as possible future. I think I'll be keeping it around for a while at least if only to impress the users of that other operating system that sometimes come around.

Random note, cvs version of metacity checked for a compositing manager during configure. Are there cool compositing features in cvs metacity?

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