GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 664172
better visual feedback for the application switcher
Last modified: 2011-11-30 00:10:43 UTC
I find the current application switcher a bit slow to work with, and the reason being a lack of feedback as to what will happen. Right now I have to click Alt+Tab (or Alt+`), wait for the window to pop up and try to see what I'm switching to. Compare this to how metacity does it, with a thing border around the window it is switching to, or compiz that makes everything slightly transparent and "lifts" the relevant application. Something similar would be very nice for gnome-shell, although it would have to be designed a bit different for the application centric mindset.
I see what Compiz does, but what's Metacity solution? AFAICT, if the window is not visible, you either have to 1) Do nothing (current solution), or 2) Raise it (which may look a little messy). The big advantage of the current solution is that only the icon selection changes; the drawback is indeed that you don't see the window. Maybe a composite effect could be an improvement, but you'd need to suggest a design.
Note that what Metacity does is implemented by Mutter as well, and with the same keybindings (Alt-Esc for cycle_window and Alt-F6 for cycle_group). And Metacity by default has switch_window on Alt-Tab, which shows a popup window very very similar to the shell one - the only difference is Alt-AboveTab, which is not present in Metacity.
(In reply to comment #1) > Maybe a composite effect could be an improvement, but you'd need to suggest a > design. I'm not a designer, so here's where I was hoping the Gnome designers would come up with something fantastic. I just notice that this is something that is hampering my workflow, comping from a compiz desktop. :) (In reply to comment #2) > Note that what Metacity does is implemented by Mutter as well, and with the > same keybindings (Alt-Esc for cycle_window and Alt-F6 for cycle_group). > And Metacity by default has switch_window on Alt-Tab, which shows a popup > window very very similar to the shell one - the only difference is > Alt-AboveTab, which is not present in Metacity. Interesting. Did not know of Alt-Esc. It is broken here though. The border origin is always the origin of the first window switched to, not the window it is trying to highlight. Still, this effect is just for one of the switching possibilities, so the primary ones could still use something.
Thanks for the bug report. This particular bug has already been reported into our bug tracking system, but please feel free to report any further bugs you find. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 639884 ***