[xmonad] Gnome Workspace Switcher

[Max Battcher]

Lara Michaels <laramichaels1978 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> A graphical pager would also be a great way to solve both my problems. I am on Ubuntu and tried enabling the one that comes with the Gnome panel ("Workspace switcher"), but though everything works I can only see the shaded contours of the windows on the different workspaces... Is there a way to have it show either an icon or a miniaturized "preview" of what each window is displaying?

Gnome Workspace switcher will attempt to show icons in the boxes that 
represent windows when the box is big enough. You can try to get more 
icons by increasing the size that the Workspace Switcher has available 
to work with (ie, by increasing the size of your bar/panel).

It's possible that you can find a compositing window manager plugin that 
will show window previews on hover of the Workspace Switcher. (I had 
such a thing working in either Beryl or Compiz at one point.)

What I've been using when I need to remember where I left a specific app 
(or want a quick review of all of the applications I am running) is 
Gnome's Application/Task switcher menu (not the bar, but the menu). You 
can set the menu to list all of your workspaces, rather than just the 
current one. The menu shows, grouped under each workspace name, an icon 
and title for every application. With the Gnome manageHook properly 
configured in your xmonad.hs you can click on an application on the menu 
and jump to the appropriate workspace.

Finally, it also helps to have strong keyboard bindings for workspace 
switching. If you don't have them already, you probably want good "next 
workspace" and "previous workspace" key bindings (in the "cycle 
workspace" module). Sometimes its just as quick to flip around all of 
your workspaces and see the real things.

--
--Max Battcher--
http://worldmaker.net