iswitchw improvement (icycle)

[Fernando <ferkiwi gmail com>]

On Thu, Aug 7, 2008 at 6:47 PM, Daniel M German wrote:

I recently started hacking iswitch.

That's great! I had been thinking on that too.
Some time ago I tried to make the first window matched to be "raised" ..trying to have the same behavior that the windows have when cycling by sawfish "cycle-" commands.
 

I have extended it a bit. The command first lists all windows. But if
you press Ctrl-W then it lists only windows in the current
workspace. If you press Ctrl-C is shows only windows in the class of
the window at the top of the list. I have also extended it to show the
workspace (when you have lots of windows, any piece of info helps.

Looks nice. A thing that
 

I find it easier to use than using cycle. But it is not perfect. I'd
like it to display the window's icon, but it is not trivial (the way
it is implemented).

Yes, I also had a look at that. It uses display-message, I'm not sure but it looks like this command is hard coded in C, only showing a string of text.
 

 When you have too many windows it a very busy
list, where it is difficult to pick up what matters, but regular
expressions help a lot, though!

Agree, regexp rocks :P ...however I think it's a pitty that the regexp only matches the title of the windows and not the whole line of text displayed (it would allow matches by class/workspace/machine/whatever info shown). But I think that the way iswitch is implemented makes it a bit hard, so maybe your approach is a more feasible option.

As I mentioned in a previous message I have also implemented a
cycle-in-class (similar to OS X). I used them too.

But I think that in general, the most effective and general way to
switch  is by providing a list.

Lately I was looking at the cycling functions trying to see how
difficult it would be to display icons instead of strings. It looks
like it is not trivial. It would be great if we can hack a function to
display a mix text and icons (a list) that we can then call. It would
be really, really, great.

I agree with that.
In the Merlin scripts there was something like a "fancy-message" function... but I still didn't looked at it.
 

I also forgot, another problem with icycle is that the mouse is
disabled. You can only use the keyboard when cycling).

--dmg

I don't understand that. How do you want to use the mouse?


--
Fernando