Backstep 0.1
Backstep is a daemon that draws icons on the desktop for minimized windows. It doesn't depend on the window manager or a desktop-drawing program. It it meant to work with window managers that are EWHM compliant. However, I only know that it works with Metacity and Xfwm4. And I know that it doesn't work with Fluxbox and that it only works partially with kwin. I haven't yet tested it with other window managers.
Drawing icons for minimized windows on the desktop might be considered a step backwards by most people (hence the name), but I find it useful to identify minimized windows by position rather than name.
_Features_
** Simple to use. You don't have to configure anything - just run 'backstep'.
** Session management support. To the extent that it adds itself to the session so that it will be started automatically when you log in to your desktop environment. (The session management code was borrowed and slightly adapted from the Rox Filer source code.)
** Grouping. Windows can be grouped together (by right clicking on their icons and selecting a group) so that when one window from the group is shown or hidden, all windows in the group are shown or hidden, respectively.
** Configurable. You can make some adjustments to the way the icons look. This is done through a simple configuration dialog launched by right-clicking on an icon.
_Installing_
Just run the usual
./configure && make && sudo make install configure accepts the usual arguments. The only file installed is $PREFIX/bin/backstep
_Notes_
The icons drawn are the ones specified by the application. I've started working on the code to use xdamage, xrender, and xcomposite to draw miniture windows that mirror the actual window contents instead. This doesn't work too well yet,as I don't know what I'm doing. Specifically, the scaling is off so there's an extra negative strip at the bottom of the icons, and the resizes aren't yet handled. But you can play around with it by adding the following line to the file ~/.backstep (or editing it if its already there and turned off): icons.xrender=true