Awn

an option for windows screen shot instead of dock icon

Asked by Fazil

Will there be a version of awn that can show thumbnails of window instead of the icon as the macos dock.

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Mark Lee (malept) said :
#1

No, that's something that the window manager handles. Compiz has a plugin for this, but I don't remember the name of it (as I have not used Compiz in over a year now).

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Fazil (fazillatheef) said :
#2

When I enabled window preview in compiz I got a small window preview over the awn icon when I put the cursor over the icon....

My question is whether there is any chance for awn to show window preview instead of the icon... I know its not implemented but is it possible?

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Mark Lee (malept) said :
#3

It's possible, yes, but there are a number of variables that need to be taken into consideration before something like this is implemented:
* when to show the preview,
* how often to refresh the preview (as I don't think that there's a way to have "live" thumbnails across different window managers)
* we would have to determine if the amount of CPU/memory used for this action is acceptable
* the icons are square, whereas the windows are not usually square - we'd have to figure out how to place abnormally shaped windows, and ensure that the scaling doesn't screw up

Note also that it won't work with video (e.g., media players).

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Michal Hruby (mhr3) said :
#4

moonbeam's Shiny Switcher applet does take snapshots of active windows, perhaps you'd like to look at it - and it does work even with video, but the CPU usage is really pretty high.

I personally wouldn't want to have this in AWN's core.

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Fazil (fazillatheef) said :
#5

@mark lee
will there be a need for a plugin in compiz that integrates with awn to make this possible..

@Michal Hruby
its a workspace switcher and not an application switcher... and I feel workspace switcher is not functional on awn.. better use compiz expo...

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Fazil (fazillatheef) said :
#6

@mark lee
will there be a need for a plugin in compiz that integrates with awn to make this possible..

@Michal Hruby
its a workspace switcher and not an application switcher... and I feel workspace switcher is not functional on awn.. better use compiz expo...

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Michal Hruby (mhr3) said :
#7

My point was that it's already done in Shiny Switcher without any need of compiz plugin and it works fine with different window managers as well.. But IMO the CPU usage is too high for it to be used for every window on the dock...

You can try making a compiz plugin that will integrate with AWN, but we don't like WM-specific code in AWN core... On the other hand taskmanager is just an applet, so a compiz-specific taskmanager applet is feasible, but I'm sure that it won't be easy to implement.

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