Switcher

Switcher is a Gnome Shell extension for quickly switching windows by typing.

Installation

Download from https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/973/switcher/ or checkout to the correct place as

mkdir -p ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions # only needed if this is the first extension you install
cd ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions
git clone https://github.com/daniellandau/switcher.git switcher@landau.fi

Log out and back in of GNOME Shell, and you can then enable the extension with Gnome Tweaks.

How to use

Use the configured hot key (<kbd>Super</kbd>+<kbd>w</kbd>by default) to open the switcher and start typing a part of the name or current title of the window you want. Hit the <kbd>Esc</kbd> key to cancel and the <kbd>Return</kbd> key to activate the window at the top of the list.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome and I will try my best to answer quickly to all suggestions. If you start working on something mentioned in TODO.md, let me know so I don't scoop you.

License

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

Aknowledgements

As there is no really good central place to find documentation on writing Gnome Shell Extensions I'll list here where I got information from.

• The source code of Project Hamster Extension
• The source code of Window List Extension
• The source code of Todo.txt Extension
• The source code of Gnome Shell itself (especially the file js/ui/switcherPopup.js)
• The documentation listed in this Stackoverflow answer
• The Shell Toolkit documentation, which is written for the C library, but can be used for JS too, using e.g. new St.Label() to make a an StLabel.

The icon is based on the "Restore Window" icon by Lloyd Humphreys from the Noun Project, used under a CC-BY version 3.0 license.

I thank my employer Futurice for providing monetary sponsorship for this work through the Spice Program