Avant Window Navigator Gets Live Window Previews

You could already get live window previews in Avant Window Navigator thanks to DockBarX, bu the latest Avant Window Navigator from the AWN Trunk PPA got window previews for the AWN taskmanager so it's no longer required to install additional packages to get this feature in AWN.

The live window previews feature in Avant Window Navigator doesn't work like in DockBarX: you need to click and hold for the previews to show up. Also, the previews are kind of rough for the moment: there is no option to change their size and the "Launch" button is quite big, but hopefully some customization for the window previews will come soon.

Here is a video recorded by Moonbeam (AWN developer):




To get live window previews in AWN, you need to install the latest AWN from the AWN trunk PPA. See the instructions below for this and enabling window previews!

Install Avant Window Navigator from AWN PPA

1. Firstly, make sure you remove Avant Window Navigator and all its packages if you are using the stable 0.4.0 version and not the 0.4.1 trunk version:

sudo apt-get remove avant-window-navigator avant-window-navigator-data awn-settings awn-applets-c-core libawn1 vala-awn && sudo apt-get autoremove

2. Add the AWN PPA

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:awn-testing/ppa
sudo apt-get update

3. Install AWN-trunk

sudo apt-get install avant-window-navigator-trunk avant-window-navigator-data-trunk python-awn-trunk awn-settings-trunk awn-applets-python-core-trunk python-awn-extras-trunk awn-applets-python-extras-trunk awn-applets-c-core-trunk awn-applets-c-extras-trunk

Enable live window previews in Avant Window Navigator

1. To get live window previews, firstly make sure you have CCSM installed:

sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager

Then go to System > Preferences > CompizConfig Settings Manager and enable the "KDE Compatibility" plugin (yes, even if you don't use KDE).

2. Now we need to enable the window previews in AWN. Open a terminal and copy/paste this:

gconftool-2 --set /apps/awn-applet-taskmanager/dialog_mode --type int 2

If you want to disable the window previews, use "1" instead of "2" in the command above.

3. And finally, in the AWN Preferences, go to the Task Manager tab and check the "Show dialog after long press" option.

Now whenever you click and hold ("long press") an icon in the Avant Window Navigator taskmanager, you should see live window previews.


For an alternative AWN taskmanager which also comes with live window previews but which can be customized, see DockBarX.

[news via moon-shiny]