Skippy is a window reveal program similar to Expose on OS X. Its homepage is at ​http://thegraveyard.org/skippy.php. Seems to work pretty well, not the prettiest thing in teh world, but definately potentially helpful.

skippy is already available in ubuntu 5.10. you only need to do:

sudo apt-get install skippy

If you want to build it yourself, you can do it like so:

Requires make to compile.

Helpful install guide was at

​http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-30510.html

Worked fine following instructions.

Must be added to the login startup items for gnome-session. =========================================================== Compile Instructions:

1. Download skippy from:

​http://thegraveyard.org/files/skippy-0.5.0.tar.bz2

This HOWTO was written for skippy version 0.5.0, hopefully it will work for future versions too.

2. Untar the skippy source code into a directory:

$ tar -xjf skippy-0.5.0.tar.bz2

3. Switch to the untarred directory

$ cd skippy-0.5.0.tar.bz2

4. Install imlib2-dev, libxft-dev and libxmu-dev, since skippy needs them to compile:

$ sudo apt-get install libimlib2-dev libxmu-dev libxft-dev

5. Edit the Makefile so that it won't try to bind to Xinerama.

$ nano Makefile

You want to insert a # at the beginning of lines 10 and 11, so that they look like this:

#CFLAGS += -DXINERAMA #LDFLAGS += -lXext -lXinerama

6. Compile the software:

$ make

7. Install the executable:

$ sudo make install

8. Copy the default config file to your home directory:

$ cp skippyrc-default ~/.skippyrc

9. Edit the default config file so that it uses Scroll Lock instead of F11 as the hotkey. I recommend this, because many Ubuntu applications use F11 (for instance, OpenOffice Writer uses F11 to display the Stylist, which is a very useful feature). On the other hand, I don't think the Scroll Lock EVER had a use. :)

$ nano ~/.skippyrc

Change line 24 to read:

keysym=Scroll_Lock

10. Launch skippy:

$ skippy

11. Press Scroll Lock to see scaled-down versions of all of your windows.