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tl;dr: Just think of any time you've said to someone "hey, take a look at this!" and they've had to walk over to your computer to see it. Or they have poor eyesight. Or when fullscreen video didn't work properly in flash. Or you wanted to use fullscreen on things that didn't support it i.e. GIF animations, flash animations, small print, etc. Or you just wanted to read a small paragraph on a website without fussing with terrible Ctrl++ and Ctrl+- shortcuts that break everything.

Hey KDE Devs!

One of the "linux features" that my friends are impressed with most is Compiz's original Zoom plugin, which unlike the rest does not track the mouse. If I wanted to show someone a funny 60x80 animated gif, or even a small paragraph of text I could just hold down the Win key and drag a box around it. Boom, it's anti-aliased full-screen, and perfectly clear from across the room.

Win+Scroll-Wheel-Down and I'm zoomed back out again. Scrolling up just zooms into where the cursor is. But I don't want a zoom plugin that follows my mouse, and I'd rather the screen not be able to receive click-events when zoomed in. Of course, this means that you could have a floating "Leave Fullscreen" button that disappears on inactivity, just like in Presentation software, or a fullscreen video player. If key-events could still be passed onto the active program, though, that'd be perfect -- they weren't in Compiz.

And a one-up on the Compiz plugin would be a letterbox, either dimming or blacking out everything but the box you draw. Before Flash Player fullscreen on Linux actually worked, this is how I'd do fullscreen video of everything (and still did for flash animations, before I switched back to KDE/KWin). If I could hold a modifier, drag a box on the screen, and then have just that box in fullscreen, with the rest blacked-out, then you could watch video comfortably without ugly website edges and youtube controls filling the frame.

Of all of the wonderful composited window manager features available, this is the only one that actually became critical to my daily workflow, and I miss the most. The current KWin zoom features are useless because you have to watch the video with the cursor smack-dab in the middle, and you can't just draw a box over the section you want to zoom into.

Does this sound cool?

edit: Let's start with a mockup!
[size=large]edit 2: Imagine intuitive aspect ratio correction as well! See the third-post down for details![/size]

I almost forgot! In you would be able to keep zooming by drawing a (relatively) smaller box, so you don't need pixel precision in the first zoom. Zooming out returns you all the way back to 1:1, instead of just the last zoom level. And you should be able to drag the frame around, as well.

Putting a hidden toolbar along one of the screen-edges could give you a zoom-out button, anti-alias toggling, letterbox toggling, and perhaps a button to disable the screensaver/sleep mode?

Idea updated with tags.

Holy ****. What if there was also an option for aspect ratio correction for situations like YouTube where the video is all-stretched. There are lots and lots of internet videos out there with both bad full-screen support and the wrong aspect-ratio, where widescreen is streteched upwards into fullscreen, or vice-versa.

It could be as simple as making the edges of the black letterboxing draggable. If your watching a widescreen video that's been stretched to full-screen, just drag the black bar at the top down (or the sides outward) and the video stretches to fit. It can be designed to snap to common ratios too.

This way users don't have to deal with confusing ratios like 16:9, and can just intuitively stretch the video to fit.

i really support this!
its a feature that makes me consider using compiz instead of kwin...
zooming in on the vidoes gives you smoother rendering with less tearing in fullscreen flash movies...
one of my favorite compiz features.
would love to have this in kwin!

Such a Zoom-Box should also have a screenshot-option.
When you have a selection it's quite useful to be able to save it as an image file.

It could be combined with normal zoom, in a similar way it works at the "enhanced zoom desktop" plugin of compiz. This way you can choose between zooming by using ctrl + mouse wheel (just an example) or by drawing the box, where you still could zoom in/out with the same key shorcuts.

+1

Wow. I hadn't thought about this feature before, I'd love it.

But what us poor users with no compositing?

Angel Blue01 wrote:But what us poor users with no compositing?

Unfortunately the zoom effect is based on hardware scaling thus it requires compositing AFAIK:(

I think this should be put into a new plugin called something like Screen Presenter or something. Lecturers would love it if it also works well with Mouse Marks.

Another nice feature would be the ability to pause the screen.