Comment 1 for bug 175874

I wholeheartedly agree with your report, joehill. The <Alt>+<Tab> behavior of changing windows within the MRU list of apps/windows should be expected. I experience this bug myself. I agree it makes Shift Switcher effectively unusable. Two comments:

 1 - I think sharing an "algorithm" with the other application/window switching mechanisms makes sense. But I believe the actual implementation of tracking or reporting the z-order should also be shared, factored out of _all_ of the mechanisms. Maybe each window manager takes care of this and provides it as a service to apps within? That way this wouldn't even be a Compiz plugin task (the plugin would do the work of graphics, but would get/set the ordering from a shared service).

 2 - Complicating the above comment (1), I believe Compiz's default plugin for "Application Switcher" and "Shift Switcher" allows the user to configure which sets of windows should be included in the switching list. Unfortunately, the implementation of this in Shift Switcher seems different from Application Switcher (which seems to be working correctly in this respect) and Shift Switcher is not behaving properly. This configurability, which I'm not sure if the older (non Compiz) Alt-Tab switching allows, means that the lists may be different across app-switching mechanisms, but the MRU and order-retention *should* be the same. Perhaps a shared implementation could be upgraded to support the Compiz plugins, but with default behavior doing what the old Alt-Tab switchers used to do?

FYI: I am not a Gnome, Compiz, or Linux system coder, but I have experience w/ app architecture and programming. Praise goes out to all those who actually do the fine work on Gnome, Compiz, Compiz plugins, and the rest! So, please take the above ideas with plentiful grains of salt.