In GNOME bug 570079, someone suggests throwing away alt-tab entirely to replace it with an external program, specifically superswitcher.
Of course, you can already do this by disabling the ordinary alt-tab action and then assigning superswitcher to be one of the custom commands, but I think they want it shipped that way by default. I suppose it might be interesting to be able to have alt-tab in a separate process, if you wanted to save memory and your computer was fast enough that it wasn’t too slow to start up.
Photo © kagey_b, cc-by-nc-nd.
I think the rationale behind metacity to provide something simple with sane defaults. Its simple and functional as it is now, AND superswitcher is easy to integrate as mentioned. So its perfect as it is now.
The title of that bug seems a little misleading, as the reporter seems to be suggesting that all of Superswitcher’s features should be available by default, not just the window switching shortcut. Superswitcher’s feature list includes many of the other things that metacity currently does, such as maximizing and minimizing windows, and switching between workspaces.
It seems to me that this is really more of a request for metacity to add shortcuts for some of the things that superswitcher can do already, such as creating a new workspace, or closing all the windows on the current workspace. Contracting out all those features to a separate application (by default, at least) seems a bit silly, to me.
(And I hate to say it, but from the old screenshots in the bug report at least, superswitcher just looks rather clunky compared to the metacity switcher, although obviously it has more information to impart.)
The problem there is with Metacity’s Alt+Tab when using composite (as in metacity’s “builtin” composite, not beryl’s), is that it’s slow. I don’t know if it’s because of the preview windows or what, but it’s slow.
My suggestion would be having some kind of option so we can turn off previews, or anything else, so it’s as fast as the non-composite version.
And the last, but not the least: Thank you very much for your hard work, Thomas.