Replace task switcher with Catts (Calmer Alt-Tab Task Switcher)

[aral]

Problem

The current task switcher in elementary OS has excessive motion and gratuitous animation and overloads the dock. It also gets stuck sometimes.

• Overloads the dock (the dock is transformed to include icons of windows and the icons there used to indicate which window you’re switching to). This breaks the physicality of the dock and overloads its meaning. That said, due to the amount of other animation going on, willing myself to concentrate on the dock is the only way I can use it at all.

• Has excessive motion (animates windows backwards or forwards while dimming them in/out every time you press alt + tab). Imagine that happening with maximized or half-screen windows on a 24" monitor. I don’t normally have issues with motion and it makes me feel seasick after a few uses.

• Gets stuck. Sometimes it will just get stuck in a state where no window is selected. Pressing alt + tab again gets you out of it.

alt + tab is meant to be a hidden, shortcut gesture for quickly switching between the various windows you have open.

The current implementation fails to address this need.

Proposal

Replace it with Catts (Calmer Alt-Tab Task Switcher), an alternative task switcher for elementary OS 6 (Odin) that:

• Is calm. It does not animate my windows. I don’t want cognitive complexity when I’m fast switching between apps. I want to select the app I want to switch to and switch to it. That’s it.

• Uses icons. There is very little cognitive load to recognising an icon. There’s a reason we use icons of applications in menus, etc., instead of tiny thumbnails of them. The same principles apply here.

• Enables you to tell apart different windows of the same app (simply, by displaying the window title in the switcher alongside the icon).

• Uses the system colour scheme. Love Dark Mode? Catts does too.

Demo

Prior Art

Nearly every other major operating system implements a similar task switcher to Catts. This includes macOS, Windows, and nearly every flavour of Linux desktop.

This is not the reason to implement Catts as the default elementary OS task switcher. The first-principles reasons are outlined above.

Love and wallpapers

Please see the Catts repository for more details as well as a list of limitations in Catts that can hopefully be addressed after it is integrated into elementary OS.

Also, if you like the wallpaper in the screenshot, there are three versions that you can download and use, with love from Laura, Margo, and me at Small Technology Foundation.

Happy to answer any questions you might have and look forward to working with you to make this happen :)

💕

[danirabbit]

Probably would be more appropriate to open a pull request 😉

[davidmhewitt]

Here's another "pro" for your list of pros:

This would remove one of the things that's blocking us from making Gala Wayland compatible. The current window switcher depends on Plank, which is not Wayland compatible.

[jeremypw]

You make a cogent argument - the existing switcher is unnecessarily busy. Whether Catts is the solution is for the UX team to approve.

[aral]

Probably would be more appropriate to open a pull request 😉

Thanks, Daniel, I didn’t want to presume :)

I’ll have a look at the Gala code tomorrow and see if I feel confident preparing one without screwing anything up :)

[aral]

Here's another "pro" for your list of pros:

This would remove one of the things that's blocking us from making Gala Wayland compatible.

Oh, that’s good to hear. Thank you. Here’s hoping this will be useful :)

[krisives]

I really don't like the stock task switcher in elementaryOS. This is a giant improvement.

[clo4]

Seconded on the motion sickness. I love everything else about elementary but the app switcher makes me feel unwell and a little disoriented. Catts looks to be a nice solution!

[Blast-City]

Love it!!!

Two questions:

The background color seems to be a little bit lighter than the dock,the Terminal or the workspace overview background. Wouldn't it look a little bit better if the color matched the other dark backgrounds?

On the Demo Gif, the padding seems to be bigger than on the proposal. Is this because of scaling? Wouldn't it be possible to reduce the padding like on the Proposal?

Thanks.

[aral]

@Blast-City Thanks :)

Regarding the questions:

1. I’m not married to the background colour/opacity; they could definitely be tweaked for better consistency if necessary.

2. The screenshot in the proposal section is art directed to put the focus on the switcher. I actually made a branch specifically to position it (it’s also displaying the icons at 256px). And you’re right, I didn’t tweak the padding for the screenshot version and so it will appear like its less. The actual implementation is the one you see in the animated gif of the screen capture.

[Zoldyako]

Can I suggest the Catts to display the windows as thumbnail + icon? this would be useful for when you have more than one window of the same app open, e.g two Firefox windows, I usually open more than one window of Firefox, and having just the icon can be a bit confusing.

I made an draft in Krita real quick, I don't know how much of this makes sense but it is a idea:

[ibrahimrahman]

This is wonderful! Thank you for this!

How complicated does making it workspace aware seem to be? Would it make sense to be able to cycle the view? For example, Alt+Tab shows apps in the current workspace; pressing Q or the up arrow key while holding Alt replaces the view with apps from the previous workspace and W/down arrow key for apps in the next workspace. This way you could achieve quick, organised navigation without adding clutter to the window

[AntonioBlaGra]

All my support!