beryl: usability (i)

howto enhance your workflow with beryl

Beryl has a couple of great plugins for organising applications that have a proliferation of little windows like the gimp or kopete, or if you want to group windows associated with a project you are working on. Normally with these types of applications, you end up "alt+tab"ing all over the show to find the right window. The grouper and scale plugins allow you to organise and find the windows you want fast.

grouper plugin and tabbed windows

The grouper plugin allows you to join various windows into groups, and perform actions on all the windows as one. For example, if you resize one window in a group, all windows are resized. If you move one window in the group, they all move.

But additionally, you can "tab" the grouped windows. If you've used fluxbox, you'll know what I mean. All the grouped windows "collapse" into one. You can then mouse over the title-bar, and select from the tabbed windows. When you select another tabbed window, the current window spins, and the window you selected is on the back. Maybe the best way to explain it is with a demo:

If you have Beryl installed, you can select windows for grouping by pressing [super]+s (the [super] key is usually the "windows" key) or by holding down the [super] key and using the left mouse button to draw a box around the window(s) you want to select. Once selected, you group them press [super]+g to group them. Once you've got your group, press [super]+t to tab them together. You've then got a handy group of windows that are tidy, and easily selectable.

To change windows, just hover your mouse over the title bar, or use [super]+left or [super]+right to cycle through the windows.

scale plugin and the four desktop corners

Because the four corners of the desktop are the easiest parts to hit with your mouse, it makes sense to try and put some form of useful action in each of the four corners. The scale plugin has a number of options as to which windows get included in the when activated. You can activate all windows on all sides of the cube, or just the windows on the current cube face, or just the windows associated with the current application. It is this last option that can be useful for tasks that involve a whole bunch of windows from one application - like the gimp, or kopete.

You can set the actions for each corner of the desktop in Beryl settings manager. Under the general page, you'll find an icon for shortcuts in the left panel, and under that, a tab for screen edges. I set the top right to Initiate Window Picker for all Workspaces - this shows all windows from all cube faces. I set the bottom right to hide all windows and focus desktop - this gives me a "show desktop" function. Top left is set to Initiate current head scale only which only shows the windows on the current cube face. Finally, I set the bottom left to Initiate Window Picker for Current App - this is where I can see all the windows for one application, making it much easier to focus on the task at hand.

Put it all together, and you get this:

...and this is how Beryl improves workflow and usability - not just eyecandy afterall.

You can discuss this howto on the forums.