WindowMaker hidden feature?

Thursday, March 18th, 2004

I’ve been using WindowMaker for years now, and thought I knew about it’s possibilities pretty well. Turns out there’s a feature I really didn’t know about.

When pulling up the ‘Windows’ list, normally done by clicking the middle mouse button, you will get a list of all the windows currently open on every virtual desktop. It’s realy handy for quickly switching between windows using the mouse. Once the window list is open, you can click the titlebar to keep it from closing automatically when you choose a window from the list. This will probably be old news to anybody using WindowMaker, since it’s a pretty well known feature.

However: Did you know you can drag the window to the bottom of the screen so only the titlebar is showing, and it will act like an auto-raise menu for your windows? When moving the mouse over the title bar and downwards, the window will ‘unfold’ and show all the current open windows. When you pick a window from the list, WindowMaker will switch to that window and, get this, colapse the window list back down so only the titlebar is showing. It feels the same as the auto-hide feature some menu-bars in some desktop enviroments have. Pretty neat.