Cycling through app windows and apps themselves need improvement

Hmm... Ctrl-TAB should do this. ANalogous to Alt-TAB, just within the app.

It should also be easy to do with a touchpad. I should be able to cycle through all of my Firefox, Nautilus, etc. windows with a series of clicks on the respective launcher icon.

The goal should be minimal cursor movement and being able to avoid fiddling with the expo'd windows of an application.

What have in mind is rather simple (implementation need not apply):

> Click Ubuntu icon
> Double/triple/quadruple/etc tap an app with n windows
> Have desired window in no more than n-1 clicks

Scrollwheel has been suggested for this. The only issue is whether we
want to use scrollwheel for moving the launcher around (pushing the fold
around to expose other icons).

Mind if I expand this to encompass all expo?

Didier. What does this bug still need?

Unity, as it is today, is in poor shape to deal with multiple windows of essential programs like Firefox, LibreOffice, Evince, etc.

Multiple windows/instances of the above make the expo difficult to use. Readability of expo items, a lack of borders, a lack of mouse-over highlighting, and sane keyboard methods all contribute to this.

If there is one area of Unity that has been impossible to master and recommend over the panel, it is window management.

To this end, if an agenda is on the cards, may I suggest that upon hovering the cursor over the item in the launcher with multiple windows open - say evince, maybe a balloon could be made to pop up itemizing all the instances open, maybe with some text and an accompanying thumbnail on the side? - Not unlike what the "window switcher" applet in the top right corner of Gnome in Debian/Arch does? There is a horrible implementation of this that I have seen in Winblows 7, where clicking the icon in the new "taskbar" produces a balloon with a miniature view of all windows of that application open, though it hardly helps in recognizing which one is what.

If I go to 'CCSM --> Utility' and enable 'Scale Addons' , then when I double click the application icon to view the open windows I can right click those windows to zoom in/out.

Is there a reason this is not enable by default?

And would the people that have issues with the current behavior accept this as a reasonable alternative to changing how the icons on the task bar work?

Ctrl-TAB has been suggested above - however, this is already used to cycle through tabs of a particular window of an open application. For an application (which, in general, will have multiple tabs per window) wouldn't a new keyboard shortcut be required ?

I agree that there is a usability issue at present regarding this, as it seems that only effective way to switch is via expo at present (which can be tedious).

What I'm missing the most in Unity, it's the "Window list" applet of the Gnome panel.

For example, I do a lot of scientific work with Scilab or Octave; sometimes, I can plot 10 to 15 graphics for a single instance of Scilab, all of which are on a window of its own. At this point, I have not found a way yet to deal with this in Unity. It affects my flow work consistently.

Maybe the solution is not with the unity side panel. I would gladly concede a 32 pixel tick bar of my screen in order to have a permanent visual layout of the multiple windows associated with a single instance like Gimp, LibreOffice or Scilab when working.

How inconvenient would you think it would be if all your firefox tabs were merged under a single tab? In fact, what we need in unity, is a way to handle applications that to not support the tabbed windows feature.

There are now so many ways to switch between windows of an application, this bug no longer applies.
  * quicklists using right-click on the launcher
  * alt-tab and alt-key-above-tab using the keyboard
  * super-number keypresses cycle through windows (as suggested in this bug)

I'd say this old bug has been fixed and the fix released long ago. Updating the paperwork to match reality.