Search Box

[*DEAD*]

other problem I have with Beryl is that when ive got about 20 windows open on all sides of the cube its kinda hard to find them all. There should be a little alt-ctrl-f that brings up a little window. Throw a word in and search for window titles and show the matches as is shown when the mouse is moved to the upper right hand corner (sorry for the lack of technical language). Or maybe, when the mouse is moved up there add a little search feature at the bottom which will filter the windows shown.

[davim]

you can use deskbar gnome-panel applet for that....

[Fyda]

As davim pointed out, the Deskbar applet has a plugin which allows you to search the open windows by title, and switch to them immediately.

Your original suggestion is slightly different, though. So, if I'm reading correctly, you are asking for something like this (please correct me on anything I've gotten wrong):

- a Scale mode with a search filter to only include certain windows (ie. those with titles matching your search), and hide the others
- this mode won't be activated until the user brings up the search box and begins typing

This might even compensate for one of Scale's weak areas: differentiating between very similar-looking windows (eg. documents and terminals) when they are zoomed out to an unreadable extent. (Yes, you can right-click on them to temporarily un-scale, but who wants to do that for a handful of windows just to find the right one?)

It would be nice to have user-definable filtering like this; currently, we can scale windows only on the current viewport, or windows from all viewports. Neither of those options is ideal when dealing with the 20+ window scenario you've described.

[Kristian]

Not that this is a replacement, but I've never been a big fan of scale. I organise my viewports so I have certain apps on certain viewports.

With Wall, I just don't see any need for scale; I simply set up an abundance of viewports, and hit expo if I'm looking for something. Filtering then is pointless, since I know roughly where the application I'm looking for is. For that to work, I can't really hide windows behind eachother, or minimize them, but I never did that to begin with, so for ME, that's not an issue. I'm currently on a setup with 40 viewports total (6x6 + 2x2).

Not in any way an attempt to turn down your suggestion, merely an explanation of how I've solved this problem on my own setup...