Window previews in xfwm4

[Steve Dodier-Lazaro]

Actually if we went ahead with such a design, we might as well just cycle
the windows below.

In other words, the advantage of window preview is not that it displays
*one* window, but *all* of them: it allows you in a split second to
recognise the window you're looking for, and to cycle the correct number of
times to reach it. Having to rely on a single image would be *terrible*,
since you'd process images one by one instead of by batch. You'd do more
recognition tasks, and more waiting-to-realise-i-didnt-recognise-that-image
for lack of a better term. You'd just be a slower human being. Possibly
slower than without images where you'd just try your luck quickly at the
most likely window.

So yeah, I think it's fine as it is now. The only tiny thing I'd change
(but I know it's bad CPU-wise and can't happen in Xfce) would be to blur
the thumbnails a tiny bit to make them less "sharp".

On 18 February 2015 at 21:20, Andrzej <ndrwrdck at googlemail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I have checked xfwm4-4.11.3 and all the problems I mentioned earlier have
> gone away. The preview size is big enough for me (previously it was less
> than half of that), there are no noticeable delays after Alt-Tab, and
> previews had been disabled in the list mode (fine with me but I like the
> screenshot Liviu has posted).
>
> Thanks,
> Andrzej
>
> On 17/02/15 09:17, Olivier Fourdan wrote:
>
>> Hi
>>
>> The size of the preview is configurable via the gtk theme. The more
>> windows the smaller the view will be, up to the point where it reaches
>> the icon view size (which, incidentally, is also configurable via the
>> gtk theme).
>>
>> You can;t have previews in the cycle list, it's not enabled, so
>> Andrzej you're probably testing a much older version (which was also
>> slower as using gdk pixbuf scaling).
>>
>> I understand the preview can slow things down (but tbh, I tested on a
>> n270 Atom processor and it's working just fine, so if your computer is
>> slower than the first generation of Atom processors, you may want to
>> consider some new hardware... Just sayin' ...)
>>
>> Anyway, this is why it's optional, if that's too slow for some
>> hardware, just disable it (and btw, it's disabled by default).
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Olivier
>>
>
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-- 
Steve Dodier-Lazaro
PhD Student
University College London
Free Software Developer
OpenPGP : 1B6B1670
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