Window management

[Nirva]

Hi,

I was an Ubuntu-user for three years, and I had a very stable and fancy system.
I was very pleased with it. Then after those three years, I decided to install OSX on my PC, just to try it out.

At first I loved the polished interface and the user-friendly configuration. But when I tried to switch back to Linux, it turned out that something completely different drove me back into OSX.

The way it handles windows and programs.

Linux just uses the Windows-way : When you close a window, the program quits. If you want to keep the program running but don't want to be disturbed by the window for some time, then you have to minimize it. When you have some programs running in the background ( Mail-client, Music-player, Internet-browser, Text-editor, PDF-viewer, terminal ... ) the window bar quickly becomes filled and it takes more time to find out which window you want again.

In OSX, when you close a window, ONLY the window gets closed. I think that this is really convenient once you got used to it. And if you want to open this window again, you just click on the program icon in dock and ALL the windows of this program appear again. So you dont lose any time by picking the right window.

I'm not a Mac-addict ( I have a hackintosh, not a macintosh :-) ), and I don't want to end up in a discussion about the best operating system. I really want to return to a Linux computer, but with, what I think is, more efficient window management.

I googled for a while, but I couldn't find anything like it. Does anyone know if there is a window-manager that acts like OSX ? Or how to make some changes to the standard window managers to get a similar behaviour ?

Thanks in advance.

PS : I am also interested in your opinions about efficient window management.

[Therion]

Does anyone know if there is a window-manager that acts like OSX ? Or how to make some changes to the standard window managers to get a similar behaviour ?
In short, no, I don't. What I do with windows I know I won't be needing to interact with regularly is move them to a different workspace. I just grab the window and drag it over so it's out of my face and get back to work on the other desktop.

No, it's not the same, but I don't know of anything that does exactly what you're asking. Doesn't mean it doesn't exist though.

[celticbhoy]

Is this like grouping windows together ?

If so can you not then open the group instead of an individual window?

[pafufta503]

if you have compiz installed there should be "Compiz Settings Manager" under System -> Preferences. i'm not saying you can specifically do anything you've mentioned, but from here you can edit settings for alot of things.

[Nirva]

Is this like grouping windows together ?
If so can you not then open the group instead of an individual window?

This would be part of a solution. There are a lot of possible solutions.
The only objective is : being able to have a lot of programs open at once without losing too much time to find and open the program you want.
In my opinion OSX copes the best with this matter

[celticbhoy]

This might sound kind of daft, but how many open windows are we talking about?

[Nirva]

While working :

Text Editor ( 1 - 2window )
Matlab ( 1-2 windows )
Maple ( 1 window )
PDF Viewers ( 2-3 windows )
Safari Web browsing ( 1-2 windows )
File browser (1 - 3 windows )
Chatting ( 1-2 windows )
Music ( 1 window )

Not all of them are always running at the same time, but having more than 10 windows open is not an exception for me. This leads to way too much windows in the task bar for efficient window switching. I prefer the OSX way : One big and easy to recognize icon for each program.

[celticbhoy]

This again may sound daft, but the amount of windows is not over excessive, so you could play with the possibillity of loading a dock, but without launchers, only opened windows. That way you would only have an icon on the dock for each of the opened windows, and as the mouse rolls over you will get a brief discription. You would have to set the icon size to be small enough though.

[celticbhoy]

Just a quick shot to show what I mean with AWN.

112944

Obviously you would want to get rid of the window list applet from the top panel & move all from the bottom panel & remove it.

ps. The icon size was unchanged in the above example.

[Nirva]

This comes close, but still isn't completely the way I like it.
In your screenshot, there are several icons that are the same. Like this it is impossible to know which window comes with which icon.

If all windows of the same program would be grouped under the same icon, I would be already very happy. But then it should be possible to "hide" windows, to make sure my screen doesn't get too filled up with windows.
I can hear you scream : "Just minimize them!", but if I would do that, those windows wouldn't appear in the Scale feature of compiz anymore...