Ubuntu – Hard to find one window among many

unity

I am very impressed by the new Unity GUI–it's a bold move.

However, there is one glaring oversight, from the point of view of someone
who uses Ubuntu for professional programming work. I frequently
want to have more than a dozen emacs windows open as I'm writing
code.

In classic Ubuntu, I could easily choose which one I want
from the name of the file in the bottom task bar, but this does not
seem to have an equivalent in Unity. When I have so many open,
it's difficult to find which window I want. For this, even the
10.10 Unity was better because I could AltTab through and see their names; no more in 11.04. It would be great if the new task bar had one emacs box (for example) covering all instances of emacs windows open. Right click on the
box and have the option to see a list of the names of all open
instances.

Presently, the usefulness of right clicking on these
taskbar boxes seems very limited anyways. I think a simple change
of this nature would greatly improve Unity's utility.

I already use multiple workspaces (6) and often have something like a terminal window and many emacs windows per workspace, and I'm already using keyboard shortcuts. So far, none of these get at the heart of the problem, I don't think an 'open file list' is a tall order.

Super+W does the exact opposite of what I'm suggesting. There are already too many windows open on a single workspace to easily find the one I'm looking for – viewing all windows on all workspaces just clutters the view even more.

Shift+Alt+ does not help. If I have a dozen emacs windows open on a single workspace, doing this shows all the open windows on the workspace all at once, but spaces them out and shrinks them down to little icons. How am I supposed to figure out at first glance which one I want? They are indistinguishable.

Best Answer

I'd suggest Alex Launi's answer, but with one tweak: enable Window Title Display.

  1. Open CompizConfig Settings Manager
  2. Enable module called Text
  3. Find module called Scale Addons
  4. Switch to tab Appearance
  5. Open the Window Title drop-down
  6. Switch Window title display parameter to All windows. You might want to increase font size also.

After this tweak the double-click on the launcher icon should suit your needs.

Related Question