8 ms·

I find the app-based window navigation in vanilla GNOME 3 rather frustrating, and try as I might, I just can't get comfortable navigating between what I think o

• vladvasiliu 6y ago
  You can kind of implement this in Gnome 3 by putting windows that go together on a workspace, the same way you do in i3. Hoewever, using workspaces in Gnome never felt as fluid as it does in i3.
• dkersten 6y ago
  I recently switched to Sway because gnomes workspaces annoyed me too much. Let me choose a workspace independently on each monitor please! On i3 I was getting really bad screen tearing, even with conpton/picom otherwise I’d have just used that, but Sway/Wayland has no such problems. Sadly a few things don’t work so well in Wayland. For example, Windows games under Proton work fine on X but not on Wayland/Xwayland (I guess since they’re not Wayland aware they can’t bypass the compositor?) So, I too will try this project out as it looks like it may be a nice middleground where I can be productive in gnome on X.
  • shock 6y ago
    Maybe you would find PaperWM useful. You can move workspaces among different monitors seamlessly.
    • dkersten 6y ago
      Thanks! I'll give it a try. It looks like it might help. In general, I'm happy with Sway, but it would be nice to have an X option that works for my workflow too (gnome doesn't seem to have the screen tearing issues i3 did).
  • dekimir 6y ago
    Another annoying breakage in Sway is Android Studio. Submenus appear in random places on the screen even with _JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING=1.
    • dkersten 6y ago
      Oh, yeah, I did notice some glitches with Java applications like DBeaver.
  • ews 6y ago
    Same, after years of X/i3 tearing and unsuccessfully tweaking compton, I switched to sway/wayland on arch and couldn't be happier.
    • mijoharas 6y ago
      The only thing I find annoying is the lack of screen sharing on zoom. Zoom claims they support wayland on arch, but unless I made a mistake or something, that's just not true. Some wine things don't work properly too, which is somewhat annoying, but I only have one wine application I run very rarely, so it's not too onerous to boot back into i3 for that.
• robinoh 6y ago
  > As a result, I'm back in Firefox on my primary monitor (as expected) but now I have an unwanted random Firefox window that I forgot was even open on top of Teams on my secondary monitor! The idea here is to also use the tilde while alt-tabbing. Also shift comes in handy to wheel back through the applications.
  • yrro 6y ago
    Please note that I never selected this random Firefox window. I wasn't even aware that it was open. The problem is that when I tabbed back to Firefox, all Firefox windows on all monitors were raised. And if you expect me to Alt-Tab to terminal, and then remember to use a _different_ keyboard shortcut, that is now no longer so short because I need to holt alt, press tab, release tab and keep holding alt while then pressing ` until the window with Hacker News is selected then... no way pal I'm not even going to go there, this is madness!
• boogies 6y ago
  Doesn’t GNOME at least have a setting to change alt-tab to window- instead of app-based?
  • spiffytech 6y ago
    It does, but e.g. on Ubuntu you have to install an extra configurator tool to access that setting.
    • young_unixer 6y ago
      Without tweak tool, Gnome shell is unusable.
      • giantrobot 6y ago
        Without tweak tool and several plugins Gnome shell is unusable for me. Unfortunately Gnome shell plugins tend to see zero maintenance so they regularly break with new versions of Gnome shell. I fucking hate that DE.
    • tadfisher 6y ago
      This is incorrect; you can rebind the shell's keyboard shortcuts in Settings -> Keyboard Shortcuts. There are entries for "Switch applications", "Switch windows of an application", and "Switch windows of an app directly"; you want to switch the two that are bound to "Alt+Tab" and "Alt+`".
  • skeletal88 6y ago
    It does, but the fact that the default is so braindead and annoying, and that I have to configure it to make it usable, is well.. very annoying. Like, why would they think that it is a good idea? No other desktop does this.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • Symbiote 6y ago
• silon42 6y ago
  >I find the app-based window navigation in vanilla GNOME 3 rather frustrating, and try as I might, I just can't get comfortable navigating between what I think of as applications. Same here. Gone from GNOME because of this.
• callamdelaney 6y ago
  Perhaps as a slight work around for gnome-3 users. I use workspaces across two monitors with the `window list` extension. To address your 'X window is not in Y workspace issue' you can assign a hotkey in gnome to move the currently active window up or down a workspace. So I have ctrl-alt-shift-up and ctrl-alt-shift-down bound to move windows up and down.
  • dyingkneepad 6y ago
    "Use this gnome 3 extension" is never the answer to work around gnome 3 problems: in my experience extensions either don't work or stop working at the first 'apt-get update' you do, or just consume like 40 gigs of memory if left running for a week. Extensions are the devs way of saying "we don't care about you, but we're going to pretend to care by allowing you to write software that we're going to break".
    • Angeo34 6y ago
      Yes it actually is the answer because that's the design paradigm of gnome. You get a basic shell that implements Red Hats vision and everything that you find missing/don't like is what extensions are for.
      • dyingkneepad 6y ago
        Except that extensions will inevitably blow up in your face and then you're going to migrate elsewhere anyway?
• bobince 6y ago
  Very this. My mind is not app-centric. I want the shell where I'm looking at logs, the editor where I'm taking notes, the browser where I'm checking some doc. I don't care to think about which terminal application the shell is inside, select that, then find I've opened a different terminal window and have to search through the windows separately. I don't care whether the doc is loaded in Firefox or Chromium so don't ask me to choose based on that. IMO app-centric task switching works much, much less effectively than window-centric task switching; I hate that all the major DEs have copied the same basic app-based dock design that has been failing in obvious ways since day one. (Although Windows can at least configure grouping away, and there's the dash-to-panel extension to make GNOME tolerable again.) I get that an app-centric view is attractive to app developers, who would love me to be engaging with their brand. And that mobile has its own reasons for putting apps in silos. Does nothing for me as a desktop user though.
  • transpostmeta 6y ago
    It's interesting. Microsoft agreed with this philosophy and fought tooth and nail against tabbing in browsers, opting instead that each browser tab be it's own window and accessible from the task bar. After all other browsers had switched, they were forced to introduce that in IE as well. The worst offender here is OSX. I still haven't figured out a good way to switch between multiple open windows of the same application, not even the file explorer (Finder). It's a huge pain.
    • ctrlrsf 6y ago
      Just press Command-` to switch between windows of the same application. Command-Tab to switch between windows of other applications.
      • kilburn 6y ago
        Note that on a US keyboard the ` (backtick) key is the one right below ESC. If you have the keyboard in another locale (I use ES-intl) that hotkey doesn't make any sense at all: ` is next to "p" in my keyboard, and works only as a dead key. Cmd-` is literally impossible to use on it. If you are in this situation, do yourself a favor and remap the "move focus to next window" hotkey [1]. It is very useful and I couldn't live without it now. [1] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/280220/how-to-change-the-default-shortcut-for-move-focus-to-next-window-to-something https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/280220/how-to-chan...
• INTPenis 6y ago
  It rarely affects me. I'd say 99% of my time in Gnome is spent in either Firefox or terminal. Suddenly I'll need a program so I hit windows key, type in the start of the program name, and smash the Enter key. It's super simple. What's the problem?
  • Angeo34 6y ago
    People don't get that Gnome is simply a new paradigm that is far superior to everything else. It's so easy to manage Windows just by hitting super you have everything at your disposal. It's boomers complaining of change genuinely.
    • PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
      Maybe if your screen real estate is limited (e.g. laptop) that is true. I work on 3 monitors; two of them are 1920x1200, the third is a 40" 4K "TV". Nothing about the Gnome model is useful to me. I appreciate that my setup is unusual, and that I do sometimes find myself on a laptop. But I prefer to keep the paradigms consistent, and so 5 named workspaces at all times, thank you very much. I never move windows between workspaces. All of the windows in a given workspace are visible at all times. And yes, boomer.
  • esclerofilo 6y ago
    Did you read the comment? What do you do when you have multiple windows of the same app? Do you write the name of said program and then Alt-backtick until you get to the correct window? Wouldn't it be better to have your windows grouped in a way more related to their purpose than to the app? For example, say you're doing something (eg programming) that requires both the browser and the terminal. While you're at that, you want to do something that also requires both the browser and terminal (eg checking something in a terminal-based todo app to reply something to your coworkers in a web based chat app). Assuming you leave these things open, you now have to do 2 switches (app switch+tab/window switch) to get to whatever you're looking for in the worst case, 1.5 switches on average.
    • 6y ago
• Angeo34 6y ago
  There's a config for that in the tweak tool. It makes secondary monitor workspaces static. It's not exactly what you want but it gets kinda close for me. Wayland does away with the shitty X conventions so maybe there is hope once X finally dies.
• xorcist 6y ago
  You can bind back alt-tab to switch-window: gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings switch-applications '[]' gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings switch-windows '["<Alt>Tab"]' There are more settings like that which you can find in the manual, or from other frustrated users. These settings seem to be stored in a binary format so the resulting rc-files can not easily be commited to git. I keep a dozen lines like the above in a script I run on any new gnome-like desktop to make it somewhat sane.
  • minkiu 6y ago
    You can do it from Settings > Keyboard Shortcuts.
• mleonhard 6y ago
  I stopped using multiple monitors because managing windows across them is difficult. Now i use a single large monitor. I wish a company would make a good portable computer to fit my work style: - tall 20" x 12" matte screen with built-in stand to raise it up to eye level - detachable corded tenting keyboard - detachable corded tenting vertical mouse - hot-swappable battery with various weights available - thin 20-foot power cable with magnetic release on both ends - vertical docking station with battery charge-level indicator
  • forgotmypw17 6y ago
    This sounds like an amazing design. What does "tenting" mean in this case?
    • Doxin 6y ago
      It usually refers to a split keyboard where each half is raised on one side, allowing for a more natural wrist posture. See this diagram for an example: https://www.osha.gov/SLTC/etools/computerworkstations/images/comp_keyboard_tented.gif https://www.osha.gov/SLTC/etools/computerworkstations/images...