On 26May2007 12:54, Joe Smith <jes@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: | How do you folks manage your working windows? I find that working on a | standard WIMP desktop is a distracting battle of locating and arranging | in the needed windows. The current tools, specifically in the default | Fedora Gnome desktop are not working well for me, but maybe I've missed | something. I use FVWM. I run a few Gnome tools, but the window manager is FVWM. Works fine, and allows complete control. | Here's what I've tried: | | * Focus follows mouse | I can't stand "click to focus", primarily because it's disruptive to | move a window to the top for something simple and then to restore the | z-order I had before. Tick. it's the default undef FVWM, but of course you can choose. I actually run "SloppyFocus" - focus follows mouse, but you don't loose focus until the mouse enters another window - drifting onto the root window leaves the last app focussed. | Using "focus follows mouse" solves that problem, but I'm left with the | converse problem: I often have problems finding the window I need and | bringing it to the top when necessary. I have a fairly rigid desktop layout, with windows usually being full, half or quadrant sized. So there's little overlapping. I have single keystroke mapping to move/resize windows to the standard places, and to raise/lower/iconofy windows. I also run multiple desktops (several) with habitual uses for about 6, so that I type Alt-F4 to go to desktop 4, where I usually web browse, and so forth. And I have a tiny shell script to create named desktops for arbitrary purposes, so for something special I'll allocate a desktop for it. I have a popup menu with these named desktops listed bound to Alt-D. | 1. Alt-tab to cyle through windows. This is the exact functionality I | need, but having to access it through the keyboard, with a rather | awkward key chord is not convenient enough. I want something that will | work with the mouse. Shrug. You can bind that to whatever you like. | 2. The window-selector panel menu. Better, but it's distracting to use | the panel here: it's too far from my working windows and it's | complicated to locate the correct button on the panel and select the | right window given only their titles. I popup a list of nicely named window titles with Alt-L. From anywhere. | 3. Application window menus: these would be ok, except they don't work | with Nautilus under "focus follows mouse" (Mozilla Seamonkey and | OpenOffice are the two big ones I use, that don't work). They work for me. | What might help: | * a window menu built-in to the title bar | * a method to "restore the previous order", or at least to send the | top window down. | | Other suggestions? What obvious solution have I missed? Use a better window manager. I do! Small writeup of my setup here, slightly dated: http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/fvwm/ Main FVWM web page here: http://www.fvwm.org/ Cheers, -- Cameron Simpson <cs@xxxxxxxxxx> DoD#743 http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/ It's not that perl programmers are idiots, it's that the language rewards idiotic behavior in a way that no other language or tool has ever done. - Erik Naggum
