Window Management on Compiz-Fusion – New Plugins

Well, on the last post we (Eduardo Gurgel aka edgurgel & Marco Diego aka Bacharel Marcola) said that new useful plugins were coming soon. This is a brief look on what we’re currently working and a preview on what else is coming.

Compiz has been well taught since its inception as a beautiful, feature-rich (in terms of bling and effects), modern window manager. Although we agree in most of what is said about compiz, its abilities for window placement, window distribution and good use of screen real state were terribly lacking compared to other window managers such as tiled-window-managers (ion, wmii, dwm…). We’ve been working to minimize this inferiority.
For those who can’t wait for a better explanation, here’s a video showing whats is going on:

Plugins used:

New Maximumize
It expands the window on a specified direction as much as possible. It is totally based on Maximumize plugin.

Code
Video

Minimumize
Resize to half size of the window in a particular direction.

Code
Video

Smart Put
Cleverly find the best gap suitable for the current window.

Code
Video

New Put
It’s equal to Put plugin, but you can move only through empty spaces.

Code
Video

Toggle Decoration
Simple and very useful plugin to enable/disable window decoration(on a window, or all of them on the same desktop). You will discover how much space you waste with your window decorator. Toggle Decoration is totally necessary for us because we don’t use maximize and minimize anymore.

Code

Swap
Swap window’s location and size. Simple like that.
Useful when you have a main frame and others smaller windows on same desktop. You can quickly change the scope.

Code still not available. We will release ASAP.

Next steps
We noticed that all we need is love.
Just Kidding.
All we need is an automatic layout windows definition. So you can easily define YOUR own window arrangement. We will work on it on next weeks (maybe months).

P.S.: No mice were harmed during the making of this video.

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