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Comment by rufugee | Hacker News Reader

Barely usable? I'd hardly call it that. I find it very usable. I don't quite like the alt+tab default functionality, but barely usable is really a stretch. I find it a very productive environment with no extensions whatsoever.

That said, I do use a few extensions, and I'm exploring writing ones as well. The fact that extensions are written in javascript is really nice (or awful, depending on how you feel about javascript). The built in debugger/console looking glass (type ALT+F2, then lg, the press enter) is very helpful, and window identification/selection is very simple. Being able to extend the environment in a relatively easy way with a scripting language is a big win in my book

ymmv, but I find it to be a nice environment. I'm not 100% satisfied, but I'm far more satisfied with it than, say, OSX or Windows, and slightly more satisfied with it than Unity or KDE.

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For those complaining about the alt-tab thing maybe you don't know about alt-`. Alt-` cycles through windows/instances of the current app! I just learned about it two days ago and I've been using gnome 3 for a year (there is a lesson in there, why was this not publicized more?).

On a more general note put me in the camp that feels gnome is getting better and better every release. I like what they have done with the header bars. Very clean interface. Initially i did nit like Gnome 3. I gave Unity and Cinnamon fair shots, 3 months each. Neither wowed me. Then I gave Gnome 3 another chance (it was 3.4 by then) and have not looked back.

It's also worth mentioning that this behavior exists on OS X as well.

And also on Unity (if you're into that).

And also on KDE.

Wait, is Windows the only one not to have that implemented?

My XFCE4 doesn't have it. It might be in some configuration option though.

Arguably Windows doesn't need to implement this because alt-tab is already a window switcher and not an app switcher.

I am into that - and you can change the behaviour to only alt-tab windows in a single workspace if you're more used to that.

Yeah, I do know that. What I don't like about alt+tab is that it doesn't respect virtual workspaces. I use workspaces to group windows I'm working on at a particular moment, but alt+tab shows applications across all workspaces, and switches between those. Might as well not even have workspaces with this behavior.

It seems that everyone has their own opinion of how alt+tab should work. Personally, I have the AlternateTab extension[0] installed, which has a configuration option to allow switching between windows within a single workspace, rather than across all workspaces. There's also several other similar extensions, each implementing their own behaviour depending on what you want.

I believe I did try that and couldn't get it to work the way I hoped. However, maybe I'm wrong...will try it again.

Thanks, John

There's a switch to turn that off in gnome-tweak-tool.

Which tab? I can't seem to find this.

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