WindowLab 1.34 review

WindowLab project is a small and simple window manager of novel design. It has a click-to-focus but not raise-on-focus policy, a w

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Nick Gravgaard

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WindowLab project is a small and simple window manager of novel design.

It has a click-to-focus but not raise-on-focus policy, a window resizing mechanism that allows one or many edges of a window to be changed in one action, and an innovative menubar that shares the same part of the screen as the taskbar.

Window titlebars are prevented from going off the edge of the screen by constraining the mouse pointer, and when appropriate the pointer is also constrained to the taskbar/menubar in order to make target menu items easier to hit.

Here are some key features of "WindowLab":
It allows the focused window to be below other windows that you still need to look at (click-to-focus but not raise-on-focus) without using a convoluted Windows style always-on-top mode
One or many edges of a window can be changed in one action without having to click on thin window borders. As with much in WindowLab this allows faster use with less accuracy
It's very quick and easy to launch an application from the menu - it's easier to slam the pointer to the top of the screen and then make small adjustments to hit the target then it is to use a Windows style hierarchical "start" menu or a Blackbox style popup menu, and by constraining the pointer to the menu bar you can be less accurate (and thus faster) because once the pointer is in the menu bar you don't have to worry about vertical movements
You can quickly access a window and bring it to the front by clicking on it in the taskbar - this solves the only problem with the click-to-focus but not raise-on-focus model - having to slide partially obscured windows around to get to their toggle-depth buttons
When you have many windows open and lose track of which window you want next you can click on a taskbar item, and if it's not the right one, slide the pointer over the other items in the taskbar (with the mouse button still depressed) to see the other windows. As with the menubar, the pointer's constrained to the taskbar so that you can make faster and less careful mouse movements. With many windows open this is faster than CoolSwitch (alt-tabbing) in Windows (although WindowLab does have a similar keyboard shortcut in alt-tab/alt-q) and some Mac OS X users have told me that it beats Expos? too
Constraining windows titlebars to the screen makes it feel snappier and more responsive - try flinging a window around the screen. This also means that you'll never have only a tiny part of a window remaining on screen.

What's New in This Release:
If no window has focus, focus is now given to new windows, and if the focused window is closed and no previous window has ever had focus, focus is given to the first client.
Fonts are now closed properly on exit, some compiler warnings were fixed, changes were made to the Makefile, and many other miscellaneous changes were made.