[newbie] {visual preview of workspaces, ignoring current workspace} when using Actions.CycleWS

Hello, I am brand new to xmonad and it has blown my mind away. FINALLY being able to discretionarily assign a workspace to a physical screen is amazing. : ) Two brief questions: 1 - Is it possible to get some sort of visual preview of what is in the next or previous workspace when moving with next|prevWS? (A little bit like regular window managers bring up for you to pick among windows when you press Alt-Tab?) Currently, I cycle blindly among all nine workspaces until I stumble upon the one I had in mind. 2- In the attached xmonad.hs, I have tried to combine cycling with Actions.CycleWS with the non-greedy view. My goal is that, when the focus is on a particular (physical) screen, doing (next|prev)WS will *skip* over the workspace currently visible in the *other* (physical) screen. In other words, I would like the focus never to leave the physical screen I am using, and that while cycling the workspace currently in the other screen would be ignored. Is there even a way to do this...? In any case, many thanks to the developers for this awesome tool! cheers lara

Excerpts from Lara Michaels's message of Sat Jan 09 11:02:43 -0700 2010:
Two brief questions:
1 - Is it possible to get some sort of visual preview of what is in the next or previous workspace when moving with next|prevWS? (A little bit like regular window managers bring up for you to pick among windows when you press Alt-Tab?) Currently, I cycle blindly among all nine workspaces until I stumble upon the one I had in mind.
2- In the attached xmonad.hs, I have tried to combine cycling with Actions.CycleWS with the non-greedy view. My goal is that, when the focus is on a particular (physical) screen, doing (next|prev)WS will *skip* over the workspace currently visible in the *other* (physical) screen. In other words, I would like the focus never to leave the physical screen I am using, and that while cycling the workspace currently in the other screen would be ignored. Is there even a way to do this...?
1 - xmonad doesn't do any compositing, so you can't really get exposé style previews. However, XMonad.Actions.CycleRecentWS lets you cycle through workspaces without re-ordering them quite so much as other methods of cycling. You end up with more recently accessed workspaces showing up earlier as you cycle in preview mode, rather than cycling through them in the config order. IIRC it skips workspaces already visible on other monitors, too, although it's been quite a while since I tried it out; could be wrong about that. 2 - Actions.CycleWS is the right place to look for this. Sounds like you're wanting `moveTo Next HiddenWS' and `moveTo Prev HiddenWS'. There are lots of other goodies in CycleWS too. They can get a little complicated to set up how you want, so if no response here .... For more interactive config tweaking and troubleshooting, #xmonad on irc.freenode.net is a good place to ask. Glad you're enjoying xmonad so far; hope it continues to be fun and work well for you. Regards, -- wmw
participants (2)
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Lara Michaels
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Wirt Wolff