beryl: usability (iii)

howto enhance your workflow with beryl

This is an extension to my previous article on beryl usability, which explained how to use the scale plugin to monitor multiple applications, while you're doing something away from your computer screen.

This article shows you how you can interact a bit with the monitored applications if you need to do something with them, or just need to focus in on one briefly.

Again using the scale plugin, with the keyboard input setting turned on, you can combine this feature with the zoom feature to actually do work on the scaled windows.

First, activate scale, so that you're looking at all your windows. When something happens that you want to have a closer look at, just hold down the super key (usually the key with the windows logo on it) and use the scroll key on your mouse to zoom in on the window you want to see. You can move around by dragging your mouse, and zoom in and out with your scroll wheel.

What if you want to type some text into a window - for example you're compiling something, the ./configure script's just finished, and you want to start make. Zoom in on the terminal, type make at the terminal, and zoom out to keep monitoring all your windows. Here's a demo of this technique at work:

Beryl - not just eyecandy.

You can discuss this howto on the forums.