Bug#311866: RFP: windowlab -- Small and simple window manager of novel design.
Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist
* Package name : windowlab
Version : 1.30
Upstream Author : Nick Gravgaard <me@nickgravgaard.com>
* URL : http://freshmeat.net/projects/windowlab/
* License : GPL
Description : Small and simple window manager of novel design.
(Include the long description here.)
Screen shots at: http://www.nickgravgaard.com/windowlab/
What is WindowLab?
==================
WindowLab is a small and simple window manager of novel design.
It has a click-to-focus but not raise-on-focus policy, a window
resizing mechanism that allows one or many edges of a window to be
changed in one action, and an innovative menubar that shares the same
part of the screen as the taskbar. Window titlebars are prevented from
going off the edge of the screen by constraining the mouse pointer,
and when appropriate the pointer is also constrained to the
taskbar/menubar in order to make target menu items easier to hit.
Why use WindowLab?
==================
It allows the focused window to be below other windows that you still
need to look at (click-to-focus but not raise-on-focus) without using
a convoluted Windows style always-on-top mode
One or many edges of a window can be changed in one action without
having to click on thin window borders. As with much in WindowLab this
allows faster use with less accuracy
It's very quick and easy to launch an application from the menu - it's
easier to slam the pointer to the top of the screen and then make
small adjustments to hit the target then it is to use a Windows style
hierarchical "start" menu or a Blackbox style popup menu, and by
constraining the pointer to the menu bar you can be less accurate (and
thus faster) because once the pointer is in the menu bar you don't
have to worry about vertical movements
You can quickly access a window and bring it to the front by clicking
on it in the taskbar - this solves the only problem with the
click-to-focus but not raise-on-focus model - having to slide
partially obscured windows around to get to their toggle-depth buttons
When you have many windows open and lose track of which window you
want next you can click on a taskbar item, and if it's not the right
one, slide the pointer over the other items in the taskbar (with the
mouse button still depressed) to see the other windows. As with the
menubar, the pointer's constrained to the taskbar so that you can make
faster and less careful mouse movements. With many windows open this
is faster than CoolSwitch (alt-tabbing) in Windows (although WindowLab
does have a similar keyboard shortcut in alt-tab/alt-q) and some Mac
OS X users have told me that it beats Exposi too
Constraining windows titlebars to the screen makes it feel snappier
and more responsive - try flinging a window around the screen. This
also means that you'll never have only a tiny part of a window
remaining on screen
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 3.1
APT prefers unstable
APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.11-1-686
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C (charmap=ISO-8859-1) (ignored: LC_ALL set to en_US)
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