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Comment by zmanian | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes i wish xmonad had 3d transitions between layouts. That's probably the only appeal of a gnome shell extension

Why is that, by the way? I've tried various transitions over the years and for any serious work I've soon settled for the plain old immediate "transition", i.e. nothing at all. Anything else has turned out just annoying, for me.

At a largely Windows-based shop I installed Linux on my system and had Gnome set up with some fancy 3d-box transitions. I got some startled wows from my coworkers when they were helping me with something over my shoulder and I switched desktops.

However, I always found myself reducing the transition time bit by bit, until I eventually got rid of the transition. When I'm in the zone and coding I might be checking docs or some output on one workspace, and I want to switch workspaces and begin typing without the feedback delay. I already have the next 20 keystrokes planned out, and I'd rather be rate limited by my fingers than my WM.

You certainly want to eventually get rid of all the transitions when you've learned to use a WM instinctively, but for newbies they can provide valuable feedback.

Or you could show a single window on both monitors (if you have two), for example, xmobar. Or you could resize the windows as bitmaps instead of resizing app size into grotesque values (150x150 pixel browser?) in various tiling layouts. Not that this allows it right now, but working composite manager (and the compositing manager in gnome3 is good, compared to its alternatives) is required for that.

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