Alternatives to the carousel (window switcher)?

Hardware Librem 5
1

I find it slow to switch windows using Phosh’s carousel. You have to activate the carousel, then swipe left or right basically at random to find the desired window.

I’m looking for alternatives even if they work only in some context.

With Alt-Tab I can instantly switch windows but I’m not sure how the new window was chosen, so pretty useless.

Are there some commands I can run in the terminal to get the list of windows titles and trigger a switch to one of them?

I just realized that it would be nice if when I press the bottom ^ button (edit: better a new button next to it), instead of the carousel a simple list of opened windows titles is displayed allowing the selection.

Thoughts?

2 Likes
2

Once in convergence mode you can drag applications over to the larger screen with a mouse, however there are also already a number of useful key bindings using the “Super” key (the key between the left Fn and Alt keys) that make convergence mode very keyboard friendly:

Super + (Left|Right): Tile the focused window to the left or right side of the active screen
Super + Shift + (Left|Right): Move the focused window to the left or right display
Super + (Up|Down): Maximize or unmaximize the focused window
Super + a: Open the App Launcher, where you can type in the name of the application to launch, or select it with arrow keys
Super + s: Open the App Switcher (similar to hitting the bottom section of the touchscreen on the phone). This allows you to switch between running applications using the arrow keys

Source: https://puri.sm/posts/my-first-week-of-librem-5-convergence/

So we can at least open the app launcher / switcher with a keyboard shortcut. But I also would like to see an efficient way to select windows / apps. I think with Alt-Tab the windows are simply cycled through so that get’s less efficient with each additional window.

For convergence mode I would like to see something like a taskbar. I did not try to install one.

Also I did not look up in phosh’s issue tracker if there are signs that developers discuss or work on something like this, yet. Did you?

Also there was another thread were users installed a desktop environment or so. I didn’t find it by a quick search. The mechanism they used was unkown to me.

1 Like