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I am new to Ubuntu and I just installed ubuntu12.04 for a week. Everything works fine until this afternoon.

Normally, 2 windows of the same application are open, there are 2 grey arrows beside the icon on the panel. When click on the arrows, all the windows from the application line up on window for me to choose. But when I click on it now, nothing happened. The windows are not lining up for me anymore.

I though that maybe I mess with unity too much and broke it, so I tried to reset Unity by unity --reset and then go to .config/dconf/ to delete the user file. I restart the PC after that.

I realized the feature comes back after the restart, as long as I do not open another type of application. For example, right after the restart, I open three folder windows and all windows line up nicely if I click on the grey arrow. But if I open a Firefox window after that, the feature is gone, no matter how many times I click on the icon, the windows just won't line up.

How can I fix this problem?

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You don't have to click on the grey arrows, it should work just fine by clicking the icons. Also, if you have 2 nautilus windows opened and 1 firefox, if firefox has the focus, the first click on the nautilus icon will not scale the windows but bring focus to one of the nautilus windows. The second click should however. – user55822 Oct 20 '12 at 8:37
I understand what you are talking about. The problem is that the second click (on the grey arrow or the icon) does nothing. But I'm sure the function still works yesterday. I have done nothing this morning except I run a software update. – Boltcat Oct 20 '12 at 9:49
ok, just making sure. I don't have an answer for you but you could execute (alt+f2) compiz --replace when it's broken to restart compiz (and Unity). That will most certainly not help, but it's faster than restarting X. Since you're fairly new to Ubuntu, if you don't know it already, you might want to try the compiz scale plugin (WinKey+w) and set it up in a corner of your screen, as a workaround ... – user55822 Oct 20 '12 at 12:03
Yes, compiz --replace is not helping. I ran it and the problem still persist. But, wow, the compiz scale plugin really help. Although it line up all windows at once, but I still like it. Thank you very much, I appreciate your help!! – Boltcat Oct 20 '12 at 14:58
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You can tweak the "Scale" plugin in Compiz Config Settings Manager (sudo apt-get install ccsm) and tweak it harder with 2 other plugins (sudo apt-get install compiz-plugins-extra), "Scale Addons" for window title (need to enable the "Text" plugin for it to work ..) and mouse actions, and "Scale Window Title Filter" to filter windows by name by typing some letters. Last warning, don't try to activate "Initiate Window Picker for window group" in the "Scale" plugin since it's not working (known bug), even though it would be perfect for your issue, and for me in general. – user55822 Oct 20 '12 at 17:24

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