plugins-extra is an optional plugin package for Compiz Fusion. Here, you'll find plugins that are not essential to the operation of other plugins, and for which you might not have an immediate use, but if you're looking for something interesting to try, this is a good place to start. Most of the plugins in this package allow you to customise finer visual details such as blurring, reflection, the top and bottom faces of the desktop cube, and the cube's environment. This package also offers advanced window management options such as the ability to group related windows, see a fading trail of your most recently used windows, and place windows on a Dashboard-like widget layer.
The plugins listed here are actively maintained and fairly well supported by the developers and support team.
You can click on the name of each plugin below for more detailed information, including screen shots demonstrating their functionality as well as a description of the options they offer.
Make windows rise above the surface of the Desktop Cube as it rotates.
- Darken every other window to help yourself concentrate on what you're working on now.
- See exactly how smoothly Compiz can run on your system by showing the number of frames being rendered per second.
- See a debugging backtrace when Compiz crashes. You may also specify a fall-back window manager to switch to in case Compiz crashes.
- Decorate the top and bottom faces of the cube with an image of your choice.
Place the famous glxgears gears into the cube. The transparent cube option must be enabled for the gears to be visible.
- Add a reflective ground to the Compiz Cube plugin.
- Use shortcut keys to toggle various states of the window, such being sticky or above other windows. There are other states as well, which are described in more detail on this plugin's page.
- Display messages from Compiz in the system notification area so that you don't need to run Compiz in a console to see them.
- Fade windows out to reveal the desktop.
- Draw fire anywhere on your screen. You can continue to use your computer even as the fire is burning!
- Arrange windows into groups to move and resize them all at the same time. You can also group related windows into a single, tabbed window to save space.
- Smoothly fade the desktop in or out when you login and logout.
- Make a window just large enough to fill unoccupied screen space without overlapping any more windows.
- See a motion blur for different screen animations.
- Give translucent windows a reflective look by superimposing a reflection map over translucent regions.
Add more functionality to the Scale plugin. Now you can search for windows in Scale mode by typing a part of a window's title.
- Scale down individual windows to keep them out of your way, yet easily visible.
- Slide all windows toward the edges or corners of the screen to reveal the desktop.
- Draw attention to your mouse cursor with trails of light and motion.
- Show an animated logo image when Compiz starts.
- Leave a trail of progressively dimmer windows as you hop from window to window. This lets you see long it's been since you last focused a particular window.
- Use different backgrounds for different workspaces. Requires patches to Nautilus when using Gnome.
- Place windows of your choice onto a widget layer that can be shown or hidden with a shortcut key. It's a lot like OS X's Dashboard.