unity-design team mailing list archive

[Jamu Kakar <jkakar@xxxxxxxx>]

Hi Alan,

On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 8:40 AM, Alan Bell <alanbell@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I have been using Unity for about a year and I am still not getting on well
> with it as a window manager, I used a different alt-tab switcher for a
> while, but I want to be able to work with the default setup so I have moved
> back to the totally vanilla unity setup. As I use it all the time for work
> it is kind of important to me that I can arrange the windows how I want, by
> raising one particular window of an application to the top of the stack,
> without raising every other window of that type. I am not sure the alt-tab
> switcher in unity is going to be fixed, as far as I can make out it is
> designed that way so that it works well with the gimp multi window UI (which
> to be fair, it does, at the expense of every other application).
> Anyhow, so that I could use my desktop, I figured I would have a play with
> some of the API codes and things that Unity exposes and build a system for
> focussing on the window I want without stuff I don't want happening. As
> unity doesn't care which application adds a quicklist to a launcher (any app
> can tinker with numbers, progress bars and quicklists belonging to any other
> app) I figured I could write something that adds a quicklist to each
> launcher icon with the window titles for the app in question and switches to
> them when selected. It uses dbus to find out what windows there are and wnck
> to activate the selected window. It listens to dbus signals for adding,
> removing and renaming windows, and for applications starting and stopping.
> It seems to work ok mostly, just gets a bit confused if unity crashes. The
> code is probably a bit rubbish (I only found out about dbus a couple of days
> ago). You can download the script from
> http://people.ubuntu.com/~alanbell/quicklists.py
> just run it with "python quicklists.py" and it should add quicklists to your
> Unity launcher, it runs until ctrl+c and when you interrupt it there will
> probably be left over quicklist entries scattered all over the place. I
> think it uses some dbus things that are fairly new in precise, but I
> couldn't find documentation on when methods were added (in fact the API
> documentation in general is hard to find)
> If this is considered generally useful then I would appreciate some help
> packaging it, rewriting it properly, or ripping the whole thing up and doing
> it properly in Unity core.

This sounds interesting, but I guess it's be a bit slow to use since
you have to mouse to the launcher, right click, get to the window you
want, and finally click on it.  I was just experimenting with Alt-Tab
and Alt-` to try to solve the problem you describe and discovered that
you can use them together to hone in on a particular window.  Maybe
you already know about this behaviour, but if not it might help the
situation you describe.

Try this: hold Alt and press Tab until you get to the application you
want.  Then, while continuing to hold Alt, press ` until you get to
the particular window you want.

Thanks,
J.