alt-f6 doesn't reliably switch between windows within an application
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
GNOME Terminal |
Fix Released
|
Wishlist
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|||
Metacity |
Fix Released
|
High
|
|||
gnome-terminal (Ubuntu) |
Fix Released
|
Low
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Ubuntu Desktop Bugs |
Bug Description
Perhaps this is not very important, since I can't actually see that alt-f6 is *advertised* anywhere (for example, it is not in the "Window Shortcut Keys" of the Gnome Desktop Guide), but I remember reading about the feature in a release announcement of Gnome.
Anyway, alt-f6 is supposed to switch between windows of a particular application: for example, open up multiple firefox windows, make sure one of them is focused, and hit alt-f6, and it will pop up a box much like the one that appears for alt-tab, but restricted to firefox windows. For firefox, this works great, but for the applications for which I would find it most useful, it doesn't. Try it with multiple Terminal windows or multiple Emacs windows, and you will only find the current window in the list of selections on alt-f6.
I imagine that the criteria metacity is using for trying to figure out if a window is part of the same application are just not very good. A while back I remember writing some code for sawfish that used the X window's "group" property, or something like that; it may be useful to investigate that.
I might consider this a "bug", if not a regression, but probably a minor one.
Related branches
Changed in gnome-terminal: | |
assignee: | nobody → desktop-bugs |
Changed in gnome-terminal: | |
status: | Unknown → Confirmed |
Changed in metacity: | |
status: | Unknown → Fix Released |
Changed in gnome-terminal: | |
status: | Confirmed → Fix Released |
Changed in gnome-terminal: | |
importance: | Unknown → Wishlist |
Changed in metacity: | |
importance: | Unknown → High |
Hi, I'm the author of the upstream alt-f6 code. It does actually use the X window's "group" property. It appears to me that the problem is that multiple gnome-terminals don't have the same "group" property as one another. You can add the debugging statement below to demonstrate this. Unless I'm mistaken here, this should probably be a bug against gnome-terminal.