Slashdot Mirror

``At least until the GNOME team creates an expose-like function''

You mean like expocity? Expose for Metacity, which I think is the current GNOME Window manager.

I haven't used it myself, so I don't know how good or bad it is. I'm a keyboard junkie. ;-)

I want to see GNOME and KDE using nifty hardware accelerated effects. Real transparency built into the terminal and an Expose clone. Then distros can start worrying about packaging X.org.

The Expose clone is skippy or expocity, and I presume, given time (and coders) X.org will have real transparencies, as a default (and stable) option.

Seeing as skippy is NETWM compliant, also it is fairly safe to presume it too will also get real transparencies at some point

Is there any plan to support fd.o composite extension for transparencies? I know the support in current xorg implementation is rather slow and not completely backward compatible, but up till now I've seen very little activity on this subject: metacity support is almost unexistant (in fact, if you want to use a composition manager, you'd better recompile metacity without composite support or switch to xfwm4). The two features I'm looking forward more shadows and transparencies and something like expose (currently there are only a couple of unmantained hacks.. see expocity and Skippy)

Skippy, desktop-neutral
Expocity, for GNOME (more accurately, Metacity)
Komposé, for KDE

Why is everyone giving Looking Glass such horrible reviews? Did all of you have a suck weekend?

I switch windows 2-3 times/minute when I'm holding conferences, compiling multiple items, writing new scripts, working on reports, listening to tunes, ripping CDs, and browsing the web. I have two Mozilla windows with 4+ tabs in each when I'm mangling entries for OSVDB. No, it wouldn't be more productive to have all 8+ tabs in one Moz window because there's a grouping scheme for ordering the information that I need at any given time. I also spent $200 on this fancy-dancy video card... for what? Xterm sure doesn't need 128mb of vid ram and 3D routines to run gcc. Why would I want to resurrect a window (click, select, click) just to type "dir" and then send it back (click) when a simple mouseover could bring the window to the front and then loss of focus could send the window back to an icon sized scaled down version? How about watching network monitors? Maybe I like watching "tcpdump" but have it tailored to only catch stray unwanted packets. I need the window around at all times but not full-sized. All I want is a scaled down xterm so that, when the lines shift, I can bring it up, have a look at it, decide if it's bad, and then send it back. How about "watch -n 2 netstat"? I like to know when someone's knocking on my ftp server but I don't need that window taking up maximum real estate at all times. Sure there are gkrellm plugins for these easy examples but there are dozens of custom considerations that can be accomplished with grep in an xterm. How about tailing daemon.log? That's another window which doesn't need to be full size all the time but you'll want to know instantly when it changes.

Looking glass and Expocity are just what I need to help me organize my screen to quickly flip back and forth between different windows or to keep the xterms running so that I can see when the scroll stops and compiling is done.

Guess you're all low-end, non-multitasking users. As long as my CPU can keep up with the demands of the WM I find a 3D WM to be just what the doctor ordered.

Personally, I use all my screen real estate for my current app. I might be in a minority but how many people don't maximize the application that they're working in?

My operating mode is quite the opposite. I multitask my workload and find myself switching windows 2-3 times/minute when I'm compiling multiple packages, working on new bash scripts, holding IM conferences, and writing a report. You could say that I need to lay off the caffeine but, oddly, I don't drink much coffee. A 3D desktop like this would be a blessing for me. No longer do I need to worry about my screen becoming cluttered with windows constantly reshuffling their order. I can send them back slightly to make them smaller or just turn them sideways.

Unfortunately my two systems probably don't have the horsepower for something like Looking Glass. I have a K6-3/400 w/ a Radeon 7500 and a PII/400 w/ a Viper 550.

I've recently learned about Expocity. Expocity is a python patch for metacity.

Screenshot here and here and here.

Hopefully it will be a little less resource hungry for what I want to do.

Personally, I use all my screen real estate for my current app. I might be in a minority but how many people don't maximize the application that they're working in?

My operating mode is quite the opposite. I multitask my workload and find myself switching windows 2-3 times/minute when I'm compiling multiple packages, working on new bash scripts, holding IM conferences, and writing a report. You could say that I need to lay off the caffeine but, oddly, I don't drink much coffee. A 3D desktop like this would be a blessing for me. No longer do I need to worry about my screen becoming cluttered with windows constantly reshuffling their order. I can send them back slightly to make them smaller or just turn them sideways.

Unfortunately my two systems probably don't have the horsepower for something like Looking Glass. I have a K6-3/400 w/ a Radeon 7500 and a PII/400 w/ a Viper 550.

I've recently learned about Expocity. Expocity is a python patch for metacity.

Screenshot here and here and here.

Hopefully it will be a little less resource hungry for what I want to do.

Expose [is] good

Identical functionality is also available on Linux.

Me, I like the more powerful multiple viewport system (as traditional *IX window managers use), but some people just can't get used to it.

...or like Expocity. I tried this out a few months ago and it's nice---when you hit Alt-Tab it brings up a zoomed-out view of the entire desktop, with each window shown, with each window's contents displayed in the zoomed-out rendition. I can't remember if the zoomed-out view encompassed all virtual desktops or only the current one.

Did you notice this screenshot ?
As a picture is usually worth thousands of posts, there are some running "desklets" on it...

(BTW, it's funny there's something on the bottom right of this screen shot which looks like an Airport base station.)