beryl: usability (v)

howto manage virtual desktops using the wall plugin

Before we had beryl and rotating desktop cubes, virtual desktops had a two dimensional "vibe". On some window managers, moving your mouse to the side of a desktop, and you'd flip to the virtual desktop "situated" immediately to the left or right of the current desktop. The rotating cube has become very popular in terms of giving virtual desktops a physical identity on your computer - I have to say, giving virtual desktops more physicality has certainly encouraged me to use them more than when they were switched by means of key press, but without giving each desktop its own physical "space" in the computer. The latest versions of beryl have a new plugin called "wall", which gives virtual desktops a 2d space.

The wall is simply a 2d representation of your virtual desktops next to eachother in a line. You activate it using the <super><e> combination. Your desktop then zooms out to display a wall of virtual desktops. Once you've zoomed out the wall, you can drag and drop windows between the virtual desktops with the mouse. You can also type in the active windows. Sadly, the zoom functionality does not work all that well, but hopefully this will be fixed as development progresses. Another thing that doesn't seem to work properly is if you activate scale to show apps on all desktops, then click one that's not on the current desktop, you don't slide over to the desktop with the clicked app. Again, hopefully, this will be fixed as development progresses.

When the wall is not activated, you can move between the desktops with <control><alt><left/right>, move windows between virtual desktops using <control><alt><shift><left/right>, or you can change desktops with the mouse wheel on whilst your cursor is over the desktop.

Check out the video below to see it in action:

You can discuss this howto on the forums.