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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."
here. ;-)
Anyway, it's a good idea and very useful.
Slashdot looked deep within my soul and assigned
me a number based on the order in which I joined
Keith Packard is currently finishing up a sample compositing manager for his X server that presents live app windows updated in essentially real time. Should see a live demo in the next day or two---a preliminary screen shot is already available in the freedesktop.org article from earlier today.
I'm glad the WM folks are already duplicating Mac eXpose layout and function: once the two are combined, the X desktop should have the full Mac eXpose functionality.
Even better, this is only the beginning of the cool things that can be done quickly and easily with X compositing... It looks like X is finally almost ready for the (modern) desktop.
I've just tried it. It works, even if it's DOG SLOW. Expose on my brother's iMac 400 is chunky, but it's very usable. Expocity on my P4 isn't usable yet.
If it speeds up I'll be happy to use it.
>Especially that neat bar along the bottom with the
>flashy icons. I've seen that in heaps of
>screenshots but I just _can't_ find any information
>on how to get it.
One answer: gDesklets.
http://gdesklets.gnomedesktop.org/
Why ? I have heard of, but not seen the expose feature. If you try asking a Mac user about it, the standard reply is: "wowmanitssooooooocooolitjustblowsmymindawayyougot taseeitman"
;-)
without any explanation of what it actually does.
Now this article explains it nicely, it actually looks quite useful.
I thought the Apple site explains it quite nicely, even with a Flash "try it out" demonstration. Not sure how much easier one could make it.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Ouch... sounds like you need automation just a *tad*. Try out radmind which will save you the 262 duplicate updates you otherwise would be doing.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Ah, but certain wms, like the one built into kde, and IIRC, windowmaker, allow you to name desktops. So, instead of calling wondering which desktop is which, you can break down your desktops into logical tasks -- have eclipse and a few xterms on your compiling desktop, your email program and calendar on your time management, and your pr0n and IRC windows on your *ahem* desktop ;3. Really, though, I think the best solution may be a combination of the two approaches, having an all windows mode, yet having multiple desktops to take care of logical groupings. Seems to me to be a win-win.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
It's a very, very evil hack. It works, for some definition of working - it'll make your Metacity very, very slow. It hooks into Metacity so that every time a window is exposed or does a redraw, it recalculates a thumbnail of the window.
:-)
This means dragging a window over multiple other windows will make the window manager unresponsive for quite some time! Anyway, hitting the magic button does produce a pretty thumbnail though.
This is definitely not useful in the real world, but still cute
A topic in the gentoo forums tells of how to make an ebuild that will get the cvs source, patch it, build it and install it in your gentoo box.
For (innovative?) eye candy, it's hard to beat 3D-Desktop.
As for the Windows look and feel, I think this is done to make it easier for new converts. Plenty of users (Linux and otherwise) are quite happy to run window mangers like blackbox, which certainly does not have Windows L&F.
Ruling the software world is all about Embrace and Extend, just ask Microsoft. I believe this is something OSS does well and many projects that start as "clones" become something more.
They have.
They just haven't felt the need to let anyone easily select it.
It's either a command line option passed to gconf to set the option, or available in gconf-editor. A google should turn it up. Personally, I'd just use OpenBox 3 in place of metacity. Nice and snappy even on low-end machines. You could run it (if you wanted ) in GNOME by:
opening a terminal
open your session editor
remove metacity from the session
and then running OpenBox from the open terminal window.
In theory it should work, but it's been awhile since I've tried to run GNOME.
Anyone who thinks Enlightenment development has "gotten stuck" hasn't been paying attention.
Michael Jennings | HPC Systems Engineer, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab | Author, Eterm (eterm.org)
Enlightenment has already a similar feature for at least three years. It's called the pager.
:)
For those who aren't familiar with it: Enlightenment's pager continually takes a live snapshot of each window's contents and displays them in a miniature form inside the pager.
- You can focus any window by clicking on it in the pager
- You can drag windows around inside the pager to move them
- You can drag a window out of the pager from any virtual desktop onto your current desktop
- You can iconify (minimize) a window by dragging it from the pager to the iconbox
Just make the pager fullscreen and give it a "transparent" background. Expose and its clones can keep on trying to catch up.
Am I a hipster-doofus?
But according to Tog this principle has been patented by apple like ten years ago: Tog has been touting the "Piles" concept ever since.
Before wasting you time you may want to read a book or two.
Code is Speech. No to Censorship.
Wrong on just about all counts:
Perl is a combination of 3 prexisting things: sh, awk, and C.
Far more than just that - there are elements of lisp, basic, pascal, english and latin and lots more. larry's a linguist and the originality in perl is his combination of all these things to make a tool delibertly designed to be "ugly" because the problemspace it applies to is "ugly" that is the innovation.
GNU Emacs was based on PD Emacs. (But PD can be considered an OSS license)
Your point? RMS wrote the first Emacs before there ever was a gnu.
http://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html
Apache is a clone of NCSA httpd.
Apache *is* NCSA httpd with patches, not a clone. NCSA httpd was open source to begin with.
OpenBSD and Linux are both clones of UNIX. OpenBSD was not truely secure by default... although some Unices had been before (since they had no external services until addons were installed)
OpenBSD *is* unix, not a clone. The berkeley license is open and the ATT license was not technically open, but for most of its life it was effectively open because most anyone who wanted to work on it had access through their employer or university. And turning off external network services does not make an os secure, I promise I could get root easily enough on any of those systems without networking, just give me a regular user account an hour or two.
X11 absolutely was not OSS in any way, shape, or form
100% wrong. The original X project as part of Project Athena at MIT was completely open. Later on, membership in the X consortium was not "open" per se, but the source was still freely available and freely modifiable (how do you think XFree86 came into being?) At one point, The Open Group tried to close the X license going forward, but XFree86 was already established as the focal point of development so TOG was unsuccessful in closing X..
another good example is Pure Data (pure-data.org) ... this is the original visual audio programming language, and its open source. its rediculous to clain innovation is somehow conclusively tied to the license that the code is released under, when its clearly mostly dependant on the author. sure, open source projects often clone ideas from closed source, but closed source clones closed source, and closed source clones open source all the time.
tasty electronic music vittles