Lara Michaels
A graphical pager would also be a great way to solve both my problems. I am on Ubuntu and tried enabling the one that comes with the Gnome panel ("Workspace switcher"), but though everything works I can only see the shaded contours of the windows on the different workspaces... Is there a way to have it show either an icon or a miniaturized "preview" of what each window is displaying?
Gnome Workspace switcher will attempt to show icons in the boxes that represent windows when the box is big enough. You can try to get more icons by increasing the size that the Workspace Switcher has available to work with (ie, by increasing the size of your bar/panel). It's possible that you can find a compositing window manager plugin that will show window previews on hover of the Workspace Switcher. (I had such a thing working in either Beryl or Compiz at one point.) What I've been using when I need to remember where I left a specific app (or want a quick review of all of the applications I am running) is Gnome's Application/Task switcher menu (not the bar, but the menu). You can set the menu to list all of your workspaces, rather than just the current one. The menu shows, grouped under each workspace name, an icon and title for every application. With the Gnome manageHook properly configured in your xmonad.hs you can click on an application on the menu and jump to the appropriate workspace. Finally, it also helps to have strong keyboard bindings for workspace switching. If you don't have them already, you probably want good "next workspace" and "previous workspace" key bindings (in the "cycle workspace" module). Sometimes its just as quick to flip around all of your workspaces and see the real things. -- --Max Battcher-- http://worldmaker.net