Useful window management functionality

Ater some experimenting I’ve switched from Metacity to Compiz, even though it’s a little bit slower on my system. I’ve disabled all animations and whatnot as I don’t care for that, but what drew me was the potential usefulness of certain plugins for window management. I’m currently trying to get used to a particular combination of two plugins, the Application Switcher and the Shift Switcher.

I use the Application Switcher (<Alt><Tab>) for quickly switching between known applications (mostly back and forth), while I use the Shift Switcher (<Super><Tab>) to actually search open windows. To increase the usefulness of these plugins I limit all animations and raise the relevant speed sliders to the maximum allowed value. To limit the amount of distraction I also change some default options for both these plugins. For the Application Switcher I turn off the Bring To Front functionality and for the Shift Switcher I change the appearance to Flip and the Angle to 0 so everything lines up.

The Shift Switcher

I’m also keeping my eye on some of the other plugins. While I do organize things using virtual desktops, perhaps I don’t utilize them as much as I thought I did because I haven’t yet used the Expose plugin. The Group and Tab Windows plugin is also seems quite useful, but I haven’t managed to get the hang of it yet.

I’m certainly hoping for more innovation in the window manager area but I have to say that I’m not looking forward to GNOME Shell (see the GNOME 3.0 release plan). I haven’t yet managed to compile it yet so I’ll reserve further comments for a later time. If you’re interested in window managers though there are some real gems [of blog posts] to be found in the Metacity team blog … for the adult in you.