It would be very nice to have Xfwm4 (through a setting, of course) not to reorder the icons of windows that appear in the "cycle windows" box when alt-tab is pressed. I'd rather like to have this order resemble the order of the items in the taskbar, I'm used to tabbed interfaces and like to navigate through them with keyboard shortcuts, so it would be more intuitive for me to see the contents of the taskbar as "tabs" of the current workspace.
The taskbar and the window manager are totally different apps. The window manager does not /reorder/ the icons, it just use the focus list. The only reorder it does is when a window is iconified, it's sent to the end of the list, but that's a common practice between window managers and this is expected by users, see bug #4804 That being said, there is also bug #5463 which is about making that behaviour optional, unfortunately, I am not in favour of adding yet another option (the goal of the project initially was to make sensible defaults, not to have anything configurable) So in a nutshell, if your request is not about bug #4804 or bug #5463 then either I do not understand or it's not valid.
Created attachment 2904 sample look of superswitcher
Hi Oliver, thank you for your prompt response. What I mean is to have the ability to have the items in the focus list (I didn't know that was the term used to refer to it) in a static order, giving the option to the user to modify it in whatever order he/she prefers. There's a project called superswitcher (http://code.google.com/p/superswitcher/) that essentially does what I'm referring to, among other things. However they have the key bindings hardcoded and I'm unable to use it (its usage is based on pressing the super key). I've attached a screenshot of superswitcher in action. As you can see, the contents of their focus list resembles the order of the task bar. The default ordering of the focus list is the age of the process, but it can be altered by reordering it manually (with mouse or through super+shift+up/down). Thanks a lot. Let me know if this is still not clear.
If this feature ends up not being appropriate to be included in Xfwm4, an alternative would be the following. It requires superswitcher and xte. The following command simulates the 'move to next' in super switcher /usr/bin/xte 'keydown Super_L' 'key Down' 'keyup Super_L' This can be then configured as a shortcut in XFCE keyboard settings and be assigned to, say, <Alt>+<Tab>. Then /usr/bin/xte 'keydown Super_L' 'key Up' 'keyup Super_L' could be assinged to <Alt><Shift><Tab>. However, I can't make it work on my machine and I don't know why. When I run the specified commands in a terminal they work OK, if I assign them to a keyboard shortcut they don't :(