'Zooming' Desktop

[cassie-is-asleep]

I think one of FVWM's best features, and something that makes the large virtual desktop really intuitive, is mouse scrolling -- i.e. grabbing the viewport with the mouse, and panning around it directly as though it was a large image.

What would really bring FVWM to perfection though would be the complimentary feature, of 'zooming out' and viewing the whole area of windows at once. This is something seen in a number of academic and experimental projects, such as the Oberon A2 zooming desktop, Evan Bradley's 'Thesis' Window manager (github project here), and Egil Möller's experimental window manager Infinite Glass.

In the case of Bradley and Möller's window managers, they go in very directly on implementing a fully live, opaque, composited zooming effect, which would quickly make this too advanced of a feature. But I think something valuable could be made with a scope as small as using simple FvwmPager style graphics and providing just a single level of zoom out, viewing 2x the area.

The quickest and dirtiest of all demos might even simply be to assign a keypress that brings up a full screen sticky pager, for the intent of scrolling around with right click; though I'm not yet knowledgable enough in the command language or scripting functionalities of FVWM to figure out how to do this myself.

Thanks for your time!