[compiz] Feature Request: Viewport Switching Plugin

[Jörn Reimerdes]

Hi,

On Tue, 2006-05-30 at 01:04 +0100, Mike Hearn wrote:
> Well, you can alreday get a film strip of the viewports by pressing
> the down key instead of left/right. It looks nice too, though it's not
> a 3x3 matrix but rather just a 1D line.

thanks, but I already knew. :) And there is no possibility to show more
than three viewports, isn't it? 

Some more thoughts about the viewport switching:
Something similar like the application switching with <alt><tab>
might also be possible, only showing the different viewports and not the
applications. Nevertheless, I still think zooming out of the viewport,
to get an better overview would be not first of all very nice looking,
but would provide a metaphor "looking 'up' from your desk to see where
your books, papers, tools etc are", which no other system currently
does.

Although I must admit, most of the people I knew do stack their
applications so the switcher plugin is very handy for them. Actually not
many persons I know use more than one ore two viewports/workspace.
This might be because with a resolution of 1024x768 there are not so
many applications which would fit to one viewport so you can see both at
the same time. But for example with 1680x1050 there is enough space for
an editor, a terminal, an dvi viewer and a chat window. Stacking windows
is fine but getting three of them to front is loss of time so I prefer
that they are on a viewport for their own. Whenever you have a
combination of applications which you want to see at the same time it
makes sense to put them together on a single viewport. 

Just to defend my extensible use of viewports. ^^ :)
And I stick to my opinion :) that one of the reasons not many persons
use multiple viewports is, that the best overview you will get is a
workspace switcher applet in a hiding panel with a size of 120 so you
can see the application icons within the workspaceswitcher. 

Hope this points out the motivation of my idea.

Greetings, Jörn 
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