AutoHotkey Community

[Laszlo]

Here is another version of Holomind's cleaned up "real expose clone" Version 0.6. Sometimes some windows were not restored properly, so I added #WinActivateForce. I added a few speed-up directives (no dramatic improvement), removed a few more unnecessary lines, changed the hotkey to Win-TAB (as it has similar functionality as Alt-TAB) kept the middle mouse button, added ESC as an "I changed my mind" hotkey.

Could someone figure out the simplest way to add little numbers to the thumbnails?

Edit: Removed the code. Use the improved version.

[holomind]

[Laszlo]

If you set "translevel_start" to 200, or so, you see that not PrintWindow eats up the time, but "Gui Add, Pic...". The first time the script takes 5 sec to put up 10 thumbnails, but later the refresh easily finishes in 1 sec (seen if you have open the date and time properties window with its free running clock). If I set the height and width of the picture in GUI to 0, it finishes in 2 sec instead of 5, but then you cannot click on this single dots.

[holomind]

i looked a bit into the gdi documentation for transform. in my understanding its more like a "filter" which is applied when you do a gdi operation like drawing lines or perhaps bitblt.
in my understanding its similar to strechblt vs. bitblt. strechblit transforms/scales your image/hdc when you copy it. and that is the point.
it is only applied if you copy from one hdc (eg. bitmap ) to another hdc( eg. window/desktop). maybe i am wrong, but i doubt that this will work.
you need to get the image from somewhere and copy it somewhere.
but there is a little chance that by setting the worldtransform windows can be "tricked" to paint the window smaller after this.
in gdi the windows dont have doublebuffer but only a frontbuffer (what you see exists, what you dont see on screen dont exists!) a printwindow gets all its information as the window is drawn again at this moment and copied into the specified hdc (bitmap-buffer). if you do alt tab the window behind has no visual representatio and therefore no "hdc". there are only "hidden buffers" and the desktop. but you cant read the window directly. (which will be different with directx10/vista/wmf which uses a technique like apple-quarz or linux-xgl. ) but with printwindow one can "simulate" a backbuffer which is refreshed seldom. perhaps this helps in understanding what is going on in gdi and window-destop display-routine.
i would be happy if proofed wrong and simply skale a window.
at least its very easy to scale a website in internet-explorer in an iframe.
but scaling "after" you have the dc-contents is not the problem. getting the dc-content is the problem.
in deskman i regularly copy the desktop into a kind of backbuffer (=thumbnail images) and have no performance hit.

[holomind]

[Laszlo]

Well, the timing depends on the complexity of the windows. In another experiment I measured the time of the initial rounds of putting up the thumbnails. With Gui Add, Pic the time was 1.7 sec, without it: 1.4 sec. It is not as bad as my previous estimate (simply counting aloud). Still, it looks better to remove Gui Add, Pic and use the mouse coordinates at click.

[Laszlo]

Here is the version w/o Gui Add, Picture commands. It is actually a few lines shorter, because we don't have to worry about adding the pictures only once. Mouse clicks are caught by the LButton hotkey, which is only active, when our Expose window is open. The activated window is computed from the location of the mouse click. We get some 20% faster startup, which is not much, but something.

[holomind]

@lazlo: this is noticable faster on my computer. so we could also improve another think, perhaps wasting a bit resources.

the script runs in background waiting for activation.
so we dont need to create and destroy the gui all the time. we can simply hide and show it.
also the GETDC etc. could be done only once and we keep the DC (perhaps not so good, but one should experiment) and destroy it only after exiting the script. at least the dc for our gui window can stay. the hw_frame = desktop perhaps should be closed and opened if some other app needs to use it. eg. printscreen.

this would separate the create_gui into two functions the second called show_gui, and the destroy gui could be split in two parts destoy and hide.
this should minimize things going on surround and only printwindow() uses ressources.

then we really need the hidden buffers for the windows, so they are shown from the cached version instead of the realtime gui-repaint=printwindow().

[Laszlo]

This is a good idea! In the mean time I experiment with modifying get_wins(), so window titles and sizes need not be acquired twice. I will post that version later tonight. (You go to sleep, it is quarter past 3 in the morning!)

[Laszlo]

Here is the version, which acquires window titles and sizes only once, and removes excluded windows from the list at the first time seen, so re-draws also get faster. Size parameters are stored in arrays, so they also get computed only at start up. It is slightly faster (by about another 20%) than the previous version.

I tested the script with 10..12 open windows, randomly switching between them hundreds of times. Every now and then there was a window not properly redrawn. In my PC "SetWinDelay 30" solved the problem. Other PC's may need longer or shorter delays. This does not slow down the script noticeably, because there is only one window created at start up, so only 30 ms delay is added there. At selection the GUI is destroyed and a window is activated. It is practically instantaneous, the 60 ms delay does not matter, but the script becomes much more robust.

Edit: Removed the code. Use the improved version.

[majkinetor]

This latest script works fast enough here.
Now it is really usable.

I doubt that WorldTransform can help here. It appears that every visible control and its DC must be changed ither, and also its width & height
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[majkinetor]

I anylised your code and I have following to add.

1. get_wins() should be changed to use API function GetWindow with GW_HWNDNEXT to get next TOP LEVEL window. So you don't get controls
like taskbar etc... WinGet list will return buch of other windows we don't need

2. Maybe display can be more faster - instead of taking screenshots of windows then shrinking eatch and copy to Expose window, we can first use big Expose window and arange original window screenshots without shrinking to Expose, then shrink Expose to Scren at the end. This will maybe be faster. The + is you call Stretch only once. The - is you copy bigger images.

[Hacker]

Hm, the last script by Laszlo is quite fast, however, here it often seems to activate the wrong window (Firefox instead of Excel, etc.). Additionally, sometimes the windows "overlap", so for instance the cursor from an editor blinks in Firefox.

Roman

[majkinetor]

I have all kind of artifacts on the screen sometimes
Cursor in editor is also frozzen after usage... strange indeed...
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[SanskritFritz]

For me it simply disables my mouse left clicks!
Hey all TC users here
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Is there another word for synonym?