ArlieS
November 6th, 2012, 08:07 AM
Unity has imported a feature from mac OS/X which I find inconvenient. An friend told me it was possible, somehow, to disable this feature, but a web search isn't helping, perhaps because I don't know what the feature is called.
Here's the problem. Suppose I have multiple windows of the same type open. Perhaps they are all firefox windows; perhaps they are all terminal windows. I want to find a specific one and use it, i.e. raise it to the top of my heap of windows and select it.
On most window managers, there's some way to get a list of all the windows associated with a particular program, or process - or to simply get a list of windows sorted in some way, and click on one of them. A few don't provide lists - they merely provide icons, or thumbnails, which are often much harder to identify than text-based titles. A few particularly unpleasant ones use hard-to-identify images _and_ keep moving the images around, so you can't even remember your windows by icon/thumbnail location.
Unity, unfortunately, is in this last category - I click on e.g. the firefox icon in the bar on the left side of my unity desktop, and it selects one of the windows of that type. If I click while a window of that type is selected it displays a screen with nothing but windows of that type, tiled across the screen, and reduced in size so they'll all fit. If I can identify the right window from its shrunken image, I can then select it. But if I have several with a similar pattern, and need to read text to identify the desired window, I'm stuck picking randomly, and hoping I get the right one. And most painful of all, when I get the wrong one, and go back to the selection screen, the windows are tiled in a new order, so I can't simply try the next likely looking one.
What I want is a way to tell Unity that what I want in this situation is a list of window titles - the string one might set with "-T I_am_a_title" when launching the window, and which well behaved X applications often set based on window contents. That would give me parity with such advanced window managers as twm, which dates back to 1988.
In case this matters, I'm running Ubuntu desktop 12.04.
Here's the problem. Suppose I have multiple windows of the same type open. Perhaps they are all firefox windows; perhaps they are all terminal windows. I want to find a specific one and use it, i.e. raise it to the top of my heap of windows and select it.
On most window managers, there's some way to get a list of all the windows associated with a particular program, or process - or to simply get a list of windows sorted in some way, and click on one of them. A few don't provide lists - they merely provide icons, or thumbnails, which are often much harder to identify than text-based titles. A few particularly unpleasant ones use hard-to-identify images _and_ keep moving the images around, so you can't even remember your windows by icon/thumbnail location.
Unity, unfortunately, is in this last category - I click on e.g. the firefox icon in the bar on the left side of my unity desktop, and it selects one of the windows of that type. If I click while a window of that type is selected it displays a screen with nothing but windows of that type, tiled across the screen, and reduced in size so they'll all fit. If I can identify the right window from its shrunken image, I can then select it. But if I have several with a similar pattern, and need to read text to identify the desired window, I'm stuck picking randomly, and hoping I get the right one. And most painful of all, when I get the wrong one, and go back to the selection screen, the windows are tiled in a new order, so I can't simply try the next likely looking one.
What I want is a way to tell Unity that what I want in this situation is a list of window titles - the string one might set with "-T I_am_a_title" when launching the window, and which well behaved X applications often set based on window contents. That would give me parity with such advanced window managers as twm, which dates back to 1988.
In case this matters, I'm running Ubuntu desktop 12.04.