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Expose Metacity With Expocity

Posted by timothy on from the obvious-comparisons dept.

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."

4 of 516 comments (clear)

  1. Better link about how this works... by pldms · · Score: 4, Informative

    here. ;-)

    Anyway, it's a good idea and very useful.

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  2. Expocity + X Compositing = cool by po8 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:a Better headline would be by nacturation · · Score: 4, Informative

    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. ;-)

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  4. I just tried it by gbowland · · Score: 5, Informative

    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 :-)