Re: alt-tab interface proposal

[Gregory Petrosyan <gregory petrosyan gmail com>]

On Sun, Mar 21, 2010 at 1:19 AM, William Wolf <throughnothing gmail com> wrote:
> I feel like a simple, easy way that is consistent with the rest of the
> gnome-shell "application-based" philosophy, is to have alt+tab simply
> switch amongst running applications rather than windows.  I think
> small snapshots of actual windows are very hard to read, and very hard
> to tell what application it is as opposed to a big application icon.
> I love the application-based switcher that gnome-shell currently has.
> it is actually my favorite alt+tab switcher of anything I've used in
> linux, I just hate the nested window portion of it which seems to
> complicate and clutter things up IMO.

First, to make things clear, I am talking about *huge* window
previews, not small ones. In essence, just like current overlay mode,
but without the left pane. And alt-tabbable :-)

Second: application-based alt-tab is really hard to use. I am
switching windows in overlay mode simply because trying to switch from
e.g. browser to one of two Nautilus windows drives me mad. That's 3
(!) windows total, and I have to use a hierarchy to switch between
them — that's insane and uber-hard!

Really — how can you sanely switch between a browser, flash drive
folder and home folder with application-based alt-tab? And that's a
very common use case.

                Gregory