Budgie: all open windows overview

Sebastian

To the Budgie users: what's the current state in Budgie for a graphical overview of all open windows? Lets say similar to GNOME's overview, with capability to click on preview/thumbnail for switching to window.
I only found this 5 year old post suggesting using skippy-xd.
Well, skippy-xd is kind of old. Still works, but not without flaws.
So, is there anything else in Budgie to achieve this?

Solarmass

I don't think so.
Budgie 11 probably will have this feature.

Staudey

There seems to be something called "budgie-wpreviews" in the budgie-extras repository, but I don't know if it works, and how it's supposed to look like.

https://github.com/UbuntuBudgie/budgie-extras/tree/master/budgie-wpreviews

Only thing I can find right now is a very old screenshot of something that could be related in an old Ubuntu Budgie post:

https://ubuntubudgie.org/2017/10/developer-diary-september/#new-development

Staudey

Staudey Okay, I just tried it with the budgie-previews package from our repo, plus the budgie-hotcorners-applet to activate the previews ("Exposé") by moving the mouse into a screen corner. It works to show a similar view as in that screenshot above, but it feels a bit laggy to me.

Axios

That would be a cool feature for the users that need it (I dont use that) maybe budgie
will have it some day.

Sebastian

Hey Staudey, thanks for your testing. I kind of remember having compiled this budgie-previews exposé thing on my last install. But it was laggy too and didn't work reliably. Back then I didn't know whether it was a problem with my system (had installed Budgie along GNOME) or with this previews program. Well, guess now I know.

Right now I am using skippy-xd with hotcorner-applet. Works without flickering and glitches if I disable tooltip in skippy-xd config file. This disables display of window name on mouse hover.

How can anyone live without such a overview feature?

Staudey

Sebastian How can anyone live without such a overview feature?

I just know what all my windows look like at all times, so I don't need a preview 😉

(seriously though I mostly have apps with tabs/panes/etc. and singular apps where I don't have to see the content beforehand because I'll have to navigate to them anyway (like Steam))

Sebastian

Yeah, but still it's a nice way to switch apps mouse only instead of alt+tab.
And to check what apps a currently running instead of looking for the dots over the icons in Budgie panel.
But in the end, whatever, right. We have all different needs and workflows.

But for everyone who wanna try out: skippy-xd is very easy to compile.