#3957 NORM Never A: Support Alt-Tab window switching, or FLWM

[Zarro Boogs per Child]

#3957: Support Alt-Tab window switching, or FLWM
-------------------------+--------------------------------------------------
 Reporter:  ssb22        |       Owner:  jg            
     Type:  enhancement  |      Status:  new           
 Priority:  normal       |   Milestone:  Never Assigned
Component:  distro       |     Version:                
 Keywords:               |    Verified:  0             
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 ==Why==
 The current Sugar window-switching requires clicking on the ring, which is
 OK for normal use but sometimes you might want to rapidly switch between
 two applications (e.g. a book and a document you're working on) and it
 will be convenient to have something like the Alt-Tab window switching
 supported in many desktops.

 Another reason for having Alt-Tab is that it will allow developers to run
 Sugar activites concurrently with X11 apps that are not part of Sugar
 (such as Wine, ticket 3213).  Currently if this is done then once the
 Sugar activities have obscured the non-Sugar windows there is no way to
 get the latter back apart from quitting all Sugar activities.

 ==Using matchbox-remote==
 A rudimentary window switcher can be achieved by typing this into the
 developer console:

 {{{
 while true; do read -p "Press Enter to switch windows: "
 matchbox-remote -next; done
 }}}

 then to switch windows you show the developer console, press Enter, and
 hide the developer console again, i.e. Alt-0 Enter Alt-0.  It would be
 nice if that could be reduced to one keystroke, such as by binding that
 matchbox-remote command to a hotkey.

 One problem with this approach is that it always switches in a round-robin
 fashion; that's OK if you have only 2 or 3 windows open but if you have
 more then you might want a window list.

 ==FLWM==
 I find the FLWM (Fast Light Window Manager) to be more useful than
 Matchbox, if nothing else because it supports Alt-Tab rapid switching
 between windows (including X11 windows that are not Sugar activities),
 while having similar functionality to Matchbox in other ways.

 The binaries on flwm.sourceforge.net did not work on the XO, yum couldn't
 find a package, and I had terrible trouble compiling from source on either
 the XO or an emulator (when installing the C++ compiler it kept running
 out of RAM and/or disk), so I did "apt-get flwm" on my Debian Etch coLinux
 installation and copied out /usr/bin/flwm and /usr/lib/libfltk.so.1.1 and
 it worked.

 Once flwm is on the system, you can type
 {{{
 matchbox-remote -exit ; flwm &
 }}}
 but that gives many X_GrabKey errors which means you can't use Alt-Tab.
 Evidently some part of Sugar (apart from matchbox) is considered to "own"
 the keypresses and flwm can't have them (even though Alt-Tab does nothing
 in Sugar).

 Alternatively you could put flwm into /home/olpc/.xinitrc and restart X,
 but then Sugar doesn't get on very well.  You have to go into a tiny-font
 xterm instead, and it doesn't seem possible to launch the Sugar activities
 or even the developer console from the command line.

-- 
Ticket URL: <https://dev.laptop.org/ticket/3957>
One Laptop Per Child <https://dev.laptop.org>
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