And people mention it in combination with a tiled WM… Now that I am actually the author of a tool[1] making Metacity a tiling WM (almost) then hey! ;-P

[1]: http://www.grillbar.org/wordpress/?p=306, and http://launchpad.net/winwrangler

As far as I can recall, Metacity doesn’t even have the option to automatically tile windows, so it’s not really surprising that it also doesn’t have the option to navigate tiled windows.

Since this could probably be done outside Metacity with libwnck, and since there’s an entire genre of automatically-tiling window-managers these days, I vote for WONTFIX.

The cool thing about it is, you move between windows based on the place you see them in the screen instead of a list based on who-remembers-the-order-they-where-open. Its much more intuitive.

Switching to the next window in a certain direction, on the other hand, seems too complicated. How about something that allows switching to the left/right window in the window list, similar to mousewheeling over the applet? Has a dependable ordering that is constantly visible and can be adjusted manually (per drag&dop) to match to the workflow.

When I used size-by-side dual-head more often, I sometimes wanted a keybinding to switch between the topmost window on the left screen to the topmost window on the right screen, and back, just so that I could continue typing into the right window (shell versus editor) without having to use a mouse for switching.

Why not just use Alt-Tab? When you have more than two windows per workspace, you need to slow down and start counting the Tab keystrokes to get the window you want. The slowdown (and context switch to thinking about windows rather than thinking about the task at hand) was sufficiently significant that I sometimes preferred to use my mouse for switching.

Having said that, I don’t personally miss a feature like you described. It works well in vim because windows can’t overlap and it’s usually pretty clear where you’re switching to.

I rarely have overlapping windows, so I find it really convenient that I can implement “focus-follows-fingers-follows-eyes” by hitting Win-{up,down,left,right} to focus the next window in some direction. It leads to nice efficient refocusing behaviour without needing the mouse – good for when I tile 4 xterms on the screen, or something like that.