Hi Alan, On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 8:40 AM, Alan Bell <alanb...@ubuntu.com> 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. -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~unity-design Post to : unity-design@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~unity-design More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
