If Compiz is running, use Compiz's Scale and Expo plugins.

[Felix Krull]

The current implementation of window and workspaces overview (unity-2d-spread) doesn't work well with Compiz: since Compiz doesn't use "classic" workspaces like Metacity does, the workspaces overview only shows one wprkspace in the upper left corner.

This could be solved by conditionally triggering Compiz's Expo and Scale plugins, if Compiz is running. See the attached branch (if I can figure out how to do that) for an implementation that tries to do that via D-Bus and falling back to the default behaviour if calling Compiz fails for some reason.

For some context, I have a notebook with a video chip that runs Compiz, but doesn't run Unity, so I'm trying to run Compiz with Unity 2D.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

Thanks for your neat contribution Felix!

At this point, if you’re happy with the implementation, the next step is to submit a merge request against lp:unity-2d. This will ensure we don’t loose track of it, and someone from the team will review it.
To do so, just click the following link: https://code.launchpad.net/~fkrull/unity-2d/compiz-integration/+register-merge.
Thanks again!