Switch windows only in current workspace and display

Solution 1:

I'm not sure about Unity or XFCE, but fully customizable desktop switching is one of the many reasons I choose to run KDE (Kubuntu).

In KDE to limit task switching to the current screen do the following:

• Press Alt+F2 and type task switcher and then select Task Switcher from the drop-down list.

• Inside the task switcher control panel's main tab there is a section called Filter windows by.

• Select the check box for Virtual Desktops, Activities, and Screens, and select the Current activity option for each.

• Press Apply, and verify things work as expected before closing.

Note: You can also find "Task Switcher" by doing the following:

• click on the Kick Off menu

  -- Navigate to the Computer tab

• click on the System Settings menu

  -- Under the Workspace Appearance and Behavior section choose Window Behavior

Related: What is a activity in KDE and what can I do with it?

Solution 2:

Whether you're using compiz, xfwm4 or any other WM, you can use a flexible desktop-independent task-switcher like Skippy-XD. As explained in this upstream thread, you can configure Skippy-XD (in ~/.config/skippy-xd/skippy-xd.rc for a particular user, or in /etc/xdg/skippy-xd.rc for all users) so as:

• To avoid displaying windows from other virtual desktops, set [general] -> showAllDesktops to false. Should work on most EWMH compliant WMs.
• To avoid displaying windows from other Xinerama screens, set [xinerama] -> showAll to false.
• To avoid displaying windows from other, separate X displays, set [general] -> includeAllScreens to false. (But this is a hidden switch and is disabled by default.)

See Something like 'KDE Present Windows' / 'Compiz Scale' / 'Mac OS X exposé' in Openbox / LXDE / Xfce? for some usage and installation details. Basically you can install latest development packages from Skippy-XD PPA (daily). Then you can bind skippy-xd command to Alt + Tab or Alt + Esc or whatever. When set up appropriately, as explained above, Skippy-XD should display only the windows from the current virtual desktop and monitor.

Solution 3:

To my knowledge Xfce 4.10 (and I assume that this is what you use) has only limited support for additional monitors.

In this respect 4.12 will support extended desktop mode for multiple monitors (see design/xfce4-settings/display for details), which hopefully would fix the issues that you're seeing. You can try out the development snapshots from the ppa:xubuntu-dev/xfce-4.12 PPA.

Or perhaps you simply need to follow the advice in this question: How do I setup dual monitors in XFCE?. Either way, currently there seems to be a limitation in xfwm4 (if this is what you're using), specifically that it cycles through all the windows on current workspace, whether you use one monitor or two. For details see upstream bug report.