Journal eno2001's Journal: GUI: More on Xgl/Beryl 1
Beryl doesn't have the beauty of Enlightenment in my opinion, but it certainly has functionality that I've been wanting for a long time. So, at this point I will say that I will continue forward with Beryl as it's way overdue. The only thing we need now is a better input device than the mouse which was long in the tooth as of 1995. So here's what I've discovered about Beryl in the past few days:
1. You can put a "Skydome" image around the environment that your desktop cube lives in. This image is only visible when you are rotating the desktop cube. Currently I have this awesome photo I took of an Australian outback sky which really makes the desktop cube space feel wide open.
2. The absolutely cool hotspot in the upper right that brings all open windows from all desktops into a thumbnail view. Much better than Alt-Tab or scrolling between desktops. The only drawback is that it doesn't display minimized apps. I did find out that you can change the hotspot in the Beryl Settings Manager under Shortcuts/Screen Edges. You can map all four corners and all four edges to a small selection of desktop management functions.
3. You can set up a larger environment than just a cube as well. But it loses clarity and also gets a little jerky due to the rescaling that has to happen to get the image to rotate correctly. But there is a "virtual desktop" count setting that allows you to specify up to sixteen virtual desktops. I guess that means it's not a cue but a Decasexaangle?
4. You can zoom into any window by holding down the "Super" key and scrolling the mouse wheel. Up to 13x magnification factor with smoothing so it still looks good. BTW, it took me a bit to figure out that the "Super" key is what most people think of as the "Windows" key.
5. You can set translucency on any window to see what's behind it by holding down Alt and scrolling the mouse. This allows you to see what's behind a window without minimizing it or having to move it. I think both this function and the previous one would be better served by having hotspot widgets on the title bar where the mousewheel would automatically affect the respective effects. I can see using the translucency feature to keep an eye on a compile or download while reading online documentation in a web browser for example.
6. The top and bottom of the desktop cube (or whatever shape you set it up to be) is known as the "Cap". You can put a graphic on in for decorative purposes, but that seems less useful than setting it to transparent with desktops translucent so you can see all apps on all desktops at once. One of the coolest things I've pulled off so far is running a video on each desktop and then moving up to the top of the cube and seeing all four at once. How is this useful? Once again, if you are doing something where you have to keep an eye two or more fullscreen windows, this is your ticket. My only complaint is that you should be able to click on one of the visible sides of the cube to move to that desktop. But when you move up to the Cap you lose the mouse pointer. Oh well...
7. The ability to pull up or down on the edges of a fullscreen window to curl it up and see what's behind it is more flash than function in my mind. I find the translucency much more useful.
So far, I'm hooked though. I just wish the themes looked better and were more flexible. I also wish there were easy to use theming tools. Unless Raster and the Enlightenment crew find a way to dig into this and integrate with it, they will probably lose some users. Which would be a shame because Raster is the first person I'd ever seen to mention these concepts. I have to wonder how much of Xgl and Beryl were lifted from Raster's work/ideas.
Beryl-project (Score:1)