In GNOME bug 502491 someone is asking for an effect like Exposé on OS X. Iain, who wrote the compositor and ought to know, believes it would be better done as a separate program. There was an attempt to do this a while back, called Expocity, but nothing much came of it. Does this mean the bug is INVALID? Should the external program exist? Anyone fancy doing it?
Includes the memorable exchange:
“Every time I propose an enhancement, you say ‘go for it’. What are you doing?”
“I’m cooking my dinner. What are you doing?”
If it was a separate program, it could be activated by a mouse button or a keybinding in the same way that, say, Print Screen is currently activated. The program could move windows about using the EWMH, but I don’t see how an external utility could tell the compositor to scale the contents of windows down and back again. Iain, can you throw me a clue? Update: Thanks.
Someone said yesterday in the discussion on animated previews in the alt-tab switcher that an Exposé-like effect would be good for everything that animated previews would, and more.
Photo © Underpuppy, cc-by-nd-sa.
Scaling the window contents is one thing, another thing is scaling the actual window decorations. I think this is the hard part as you have the choices:
* create a full-screen canvas and draw a miniature of each window using cairo or clutter or whatever – but the price is losing decorations; or
* create a whole effing lot of small windows trying to preserve the decorations but now all of a sudden decorations are not to-scale with the contents; or
* rewrite half of Metacity to get the working and to-scale decorations – with proper colors etc.
i vote for rewrite half of metacity to have this and the other effects a modern OS (or windows manager) should give.
@Simone Malacarne:
This isn’t an election. If you want to rewrite half of metacity, the code’s available to you.
@Thomas
i know, comment is meant to be ironic. Like i say in the other post i think a modern windows manager should give a level of effects even if these are not functional related. It’s like cars, if you want to sell car costumer want to have some kind of confort.
I didn’t want to be irrespective to your work.
Just to be clear. When I wrote “rewrite half of Metacity” I actually meant having to reimplement half of it in the stand-alone expose app in order to correctly draw a working window border (or redirect Metacity itself to an offscreen pixmap thus creating a second compositor).
Exposé is a neat gimmick, but I have to say the *only* time I ever use it on OS X is when an application (or the window manager) misbehaves, and I end up with one small window behind another that I can’t find any other way.
Other than that, it’s no more useful to me than Alt-Tab, and usually feels less efficient to use (perhaps because there’s no useful ordering of the windows, like there is with Alt-Tab).
Speaking purely for myself, Compiz’s scale plugin does this and I use it all the time. Naturally, this is a single-person anecdote rather than a usability study. :)
Not sure what is best, but the Compiz like gesture is something I really do like and find much more useful and quicker than alt+tab.
Well, when you use most of the time only the mouse, when you have many windows open and not ordered, a Expose-like to display all windows enabled by the right-corner of the screen is very usefull :) At least, for me it’s very usefull :)
I don’t think the live preview part is usefull as well. I think it’s a just a “nice to have features”, make your desktop nicer to use.