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feklee

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Registered: 2015-04-03

Posts: 57

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Pagers with full desktop preview?

I love E19's pager which can be aligned vertically. The thumbnails show a full preview of each desktop:

However, I'm not interested in using Enlightenment as a desktop environment. I prefer a light weight window manager, plus a separate pager. So far, all the third party pagers that I've found maximally show symbolic rectangles in place of windows.

Update (see below): Now looking also for WMs that have pagers with real-time thumbnails.

Last edited by feklee (2015-04-17 22:18:30)

feklee

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Registered: 2015-04-03

Posts: 57

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Re: Pagers with full desktop preview?

When wondering about using the Enlightenment pager alone with another window manager, Rasterman told me:

pager is an internal part of the e process - the pager module is using a "widget" provided be e to make a miniature duplicate of a screen (that live updates).

Thing is, E19 is a compositing window manager.

I think what I really need to look for is a compositing window managers with a pager with full desktop preview.

Any suggestions for a window manager other than Enlightenment that provides a pager with thumbnails showing each desktop in miniature?

What I prefer is a window manager that I can configure with text files. Enlightenment has a GUI based configuration. More can be done with text files indeed, only that these text files are written in C, and need to be compiled, read: modules ;-) I'd prefer something a bit quicker to configure.

Last edited by feklee (2015-04-13 18:08:12)

feklee

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Registered: 2015-04-03

Posts: 57

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Re: Pagers with full desktop preview?

Out of curiosity, just checked KDE and Gnome:

• KDE 4.14: Pager shows just window outlines, no rendered preview.
  

• GNOME 3.16: Like in Enlightenment, rendered previews update in realtime.
  

I’d like to know what other WMs/DEs support realtime previews in the pager.

drcouzelis

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From: Connecticut, USA

Registered: 2009-11-09

Posts: 4,092

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Re: Pagers with full desktop preview?

I think there's a limitation in the way the X server is drawn that prevents this from being easy to implement. So I think any others that exist would require desktop compositing.

EDIT: ...just like feklee already pointed out above. Oops!

Last edited by drcouzelis (2015-04-17 16:58:43)

feklee

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Registered: 2015-04-03

Posts: 57

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Re: Pagers with full desktop preview?

So I think any others that exist would require desktop compositing.

Yes, that's why I wrote some days ago: I think what I really need to look for is a compositing window managers with a pager with full desktop preview.

Any suggestions are welcome!

feklee

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Registered: 2015-04-03

Posts: 57

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Re: Pagers with full desktop preview?

Evaluation continues with xfwm4 --compositor=on. The included pager is only symbolic: