I was showing Alex compiz in action today and when he saw the scale plugin (the exposé-like plugin), he said that one thing he really wished that OSX did was implement alt-tab switching with exposé – so that alt-tab would trigger it and repeating alt-tab would cyle through windows and then releasing would restore the desktop with the selected window at the top. I don’t know if Dave Reveman specifically thought of this when he wrote the scale plugin, but you can achieve this effect simply by setting the keybindings to be the same as those of the switcher plugin: initiate on Alt-Tab, next on Alt-Tab, terminate on Release-Alt-L. Obviously, you should disable the switcher plugin so they don’t conflict, although the visual effect of both running at the same time is actually quite neat.
Now, when you alt-tab, it will cycle through your windows in the exposé view. Alex observed that with the zooming, you could bring all our windows from multiple heads on to one head so that you could cycle through them effectively. The only thing missing from making this a really effective task switcher is that they visual indication of switching between windows is a bit weak (it’s just the standard colour change on the window decorations). If there was a slight zoom effect so the selected window was a bit larger than the rest, it would be perfect. Hopefully one of us will do a screen capture showing it in action in the near future.
Hats off to Dave for putting something together that can enable this kind of stuff!
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