Comment by notauser | Hacker News Reader

Comment by notauser | Hacker News Reader

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Window tabbing started out in (I think) Fluxbox, where you can group a bunch of application windows together and switch between them with Firefox-like tabs. So you can have, say, all your windows related to one task grouped together. Support for this is now in Compiz or as bolt ons for several window managers.

There is a video of Compiz Group Tab here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nK4_cH5sbM&feature=relat...

Focus on mouse comes in several flavours, the best seems to be sloppy focus with raise-on-focus disabled. When you mouse over a window it goes active so you can type in it. Because it doesn't come to the front unless you click on it you can leave your IM window/IDE/whatever half under a browser window and still type into it. Truly a killer feature, especially on laptops where space is limited.

I don't understand why "focus on mouse" is any better than Windows' ALT-Tab (to rapidly switch between windows)? It will switch between the two most recently-used windows, or, if you hold ALT, it will let you switch among all windows.

The best way to do window focus, tho, is, I think, to have you machine's camera notice where you are looking, and automatically raise that window - iris tracking and window raising.

Alt-Tab always brings the selected to the front, which is annoying. Sometimes you just want to type into the bit of the window you can already see, without reordering the stack.

Would multiple desktops in ubuntu/spaces in leopard be comparable to the window tabbing?

The Focus on mouse software sounds very cool though. When you first said it I thought you were implying Ubuntu developers had more of a focus on mouse actions which was why I didn't just google it. :)

Say you are working on a pair of spreadsheets, both of which require the same supporting data from a variety of places. That is when window tabbing becomes really outstanding, since you can tab together the two spreadsheets.

The advantage over just bringing forward the work sheet you want each time is that as you move one around and resize it (to cater for fitting the source data on the screen), the one you aren't currently working on changes with it saving you some clicks. It sounds like a stupid little thing but taking a frequent minor irritation out of your environment can be surprisingly beneficial.

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