When we work in light desktop environments (XFCE, LXDE, Openbox), sometimes we miss the ease that the "Exposé" effect of Mac OS X gives us (grouping all active windows on a single screen) and that in GNU / Linux we have available through Compiz Scale. There is a powerful and lightweight alternative to achieve this effect on lightweight desktops: Skippy XD but it has the disadvantage that to activate it you have to run the program and then press a key (by default it is F11 ) losing the functionality of doing it just by placing the mouse pointer in an active corner.
But anything is possible in Arch Linux. Here's a short guide on how to get "Exposé" in Skippy-XD with active corners, using a veteran but still useful and functional program: Brightside.
First you have to install Skippy-XD from AUR, but not the "original" version, we will install a slightly modified version that is available in AUR via GIT and that basically activates Skippy-XD with the simple command without using a key assigned; In this example we will use Packer to install it but we can do it with Yaourt as well:
$ pacaur -S skippy-xd-git
Now we will install Brigthside, what this program does is assign to the corners and the sides of the screen any command or order that we want by simply moving the mouse pointer to the activated area; it can be to open a file, run a script, or run a program. We install it with Packer or Yaourt:
$ pacaur -S brightside
Now we are ready for the magic: we are going to configure Brigthside to activate Skippy-XD in the corner that we want, in a terminal we type:
$ brightside-properties &
And the Screen Actions configuration window will appear, we mark the «Configurable Actions» circle and we mark the box in the corner of the screen that we want to activate, in this example it will be the upper right corner (Top right corner) and in its drop-down menu we will choose « Custom action ... »and another window will appear as in the following image:
We type: skippy-xd , close both windows, and that's it. Now we need to run Brightside:
$ brightside
We open several windows, move the mouse pointer to the corner that we have chosen and we will have something like this:
To have Brightside enabled from system startup, you need to add it to the list of applications that launch at startup in your desktop environment. In XFCE, this is done in "Session & Startup," under the "Application Autostart" tab, click "+Add," and enter " Brightside " in the Name field and " brightside" in the Command field. Click OK, and you 're done. In LXDE, the procedure is similar, and in Openbox, you need to manually add the command " brightside" to the end of the script in "Autostart.sh," save it, and you're done.
I hope these instructions are useful to you, and greetings to all.