How to make alt-backtick show/preview actual window (not just thumbnails in the popup)?

Desktop
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At the moment, pressing alt-backtick then holding alt causes the popup to appear after a delay, and it shows thumbnails of the windows that we can switch to of the current application.

How can I customize this so that it shows (or previews) the actual window, so that I can see it in full size?

Ideally, it doesn’t actually switch to that window until I let go of alt, and pressing escape would cancel the preview and return to the window I was on.

If you’re familiar with the Dash to Panel extension, you may know the feature where you hover on an app icon, and it previews the actual window. Basically I’m looking to do that with alt-backtick.

Honestly saying, the tiny thumbnails are not easy to see, especially for example if we’re switching between Terminal windows which have similar-looking text that we can’t read at that size.

3

@fmuellner Nice, thanks for pointing that out!

I just tried it, but it shows windows from any workspace. Can it be configured similar to the default alt-backtick, like

gsettings set org.gnome.shell.app-switcher current-workspace-only true

so that it will show windows only for the current workspace? If not possible, maybe I need to make an extension (would be interested in any pointers on what APIs to look at for that).

Also it might be neat to still see the same thumbnail switcher, for context. Maybe an extension can combine both, and make it configurable.

An extension would be my last resort, but if I can get the alt-F6 trick to show only windows of the current workspace without an extension, that that’ll be perfect.

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Not, but as the cycle shortcuts (“switch […] directly”) are intended as popup-less versions of the corresponding switch shortcuts, so it would make sense to me to follow the same setting.

Would you like to take a look at the code? It’s GroupCyclerPopup in js/ui/altTab.js in the gnome-shell repository.

1 Like
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Ooof, that’s gonna be too easy, because it is JavaScript. Nice, thanks for pointing me to that. :slight_smile: I might have time to try a tweak; I wouldn’t have the same feeling if it was C.

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I need to also make it exit on esc key, as right now the alt-F6 feature doesn’t revert back to the window we were on when we hit escape.

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