A factorizing permutation of a given graph is simply a permutation of the vertices in which all decomposition sets appear to be factors. Such a concept seems to play a central role in recent papers dealing with graph decomposition. It is applied here for modular decomposition and we propose a linear algorithm that computes the whole decomposition tree when a factorizing permutation is provided. This algorithm can be seen as a common generalization of Ma and Hsu for modular decomposition of chordal graphs and Habib, Huchard and Spinrad for inheritance graphs decomposition. It also suggests many new decomposition algorithms for various notions of graph decompositions.