Expose Metacity With Expocity

ubiquitin writes "expocity is a project to patch metacity and lets you switch between applications in the metacity window manager. After pressing a keystroke, your window manager will present you an overview of all open windows and you can select the window, you want to switch to, visually. For an idea on how this works, check out this screenshot."

Comments

a Better headline would be

[imsabbel]

We have cloned MacOsX 10.3 expose feature.
Then people would know what to expect without clicking on the screenshot

apt-get expose

[Debian Troll's Best]

With the recent release of Mac OS X 10.3 with it's great Expose feature (which the Metacity Expocity tool is obviously inspired from), it's got me thinking about some of the problems I face day-to-day in my current job as an administrator of a mid-sized Debian cluster (256 compute nodes, plus 8 storage nodes) at a supercomputing laboratory in a well known mid-western university. When I'm rolling out packages across all of the nodes in the cluster using apt-get, it can sometimes be a pain to keep track of 256 + 8 individual package installations on each of the machines. It's a full time job just telnetting into each of those machines and issuing the apt-get commands. During a recent student vacation however, some of my coworkers and I came up with an Expose/Expocity-inspired package management solution: apt-get-expose.

apt-get-expose is basically a heavily modified version of apt-get and dselect, using a completely re-implemented ncurses and screen library to allow multiple apt-get sessions to be tiled onto the console with a single keystroke. Believe me, when you're neck deep in 20 apt-get sessions trying to juggle installs across several nodes in the supercomputer cluster, being able to visually choose a particular apt-get session is a God-send!

It wasn't easy. If any of you have seen the way Expose works in Mac OS X, then you'll know how fluid that "tile all windows" animation is. It was, to put it mildly, a 'challenge' to get the ncurses library to emulate that functionality using only ASCII art. We extensively debated how we would get ASCII text-scaling support to the same level of smoothness as Mac OS X achieves, and in the end the only way we could see was to hack some low-level VGA BIOS calls. It's way cool, and it's as fast as the Mac OS X version, but using all ASCII characters (we tried Unicode, but the 16-byte overhead wasn't justifiable).

Since then, we've been able to roll out apt-get-expose (using apt-get, by the way...being able to roll out new versions of apt-get with apt-get rocks!!!) across the campus, and administrators of other clusters can't stop raving about how easy it is to manage multiple apt-get sessions with apt-get-expose.

Window tiling and arrangement functionality shouldn't be restricted only to those running Mac OS X and Expocity. apt-get tile all windows dude!!

Re: uh...

[Black Parrot]

> does anyone actually care about this??

My favorite Metacity application management tool is -

killall metacity ; sawfish &

Re: Window metaphor considered harmful

[Black Parrot]

> There has to be a better way.

Yes, I prefer the metaphor of a fishbowl where applications swim around at random, and instead of moving a "pointer" with your mouse you move a little net that you can use to fish out the application you want to look at more closely. This powerful metaphor combines the best features of a game with dynamic, organic organization of information, and teaches children visio-spatial coordination as well as fishing skills.

For troublesome applications such as viruses you can trade your net for a speargun, and to log out you simply toss a handgrenade into the tank, killing most of your applications and stunning the rest, without having to think through a bunch of unintuitive menus.

All rendered in 3D and accompanied by sound effects, of course.