Re: [dev] wmii and floating controls

On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 10:25:40PM -0500, Nick Guenther wrote:
>I'm using wmii3.5 on OpenBSD and no matter how hard I look I can't
>find a way to control if a window is floating or not.

Please, for the love of god (ken), don't use wmii 3.5. It's 4
years old already and probably shouldn't have even been
released. Isn't 3.6 available for OpenBSD?

>I can do this fine:
>$ wmiir xwrite /client/sel/ctl Fullscreen on
>$ wmiir xwrite /client/sel/ctl Fullscreen off
>
>But:
>$ wmiir xwrite /client/sel/ctl Floating off
>wmiir: fatal: cannot write file '/client/sel/ctl': bad command
>$ wmiir xwrite /client/sel/ctl Float off
>wmiir: fatal: cannot write file '/client/sel/ctl': bad command

Whether a client is floating varies from view to view, it's not
a property of the client itself. The only reason that Fullscreen
doesn't work the same way is that EWMH requires otherwise.

>I did discover the tagrules trick (which I feel lame for 'discovering'
>since it is right under my nose in the default wmiirc) of putting a
>line in /tagrules that reads '/<regex matching client type>.*/ -> ~'

It's also documented in the man page...

>None of these work (though I wouldn't expect them to; I don't
>understand why if Fullscreen is a client property, that floating is a
>view property):

See above.

>$ wmiir xwrite /tag/sel/ctl send sel '~'
>wmiir: fatal: cannot write file '/tag/sel/ctl': bad value

This works in newer versions, but as mentioned above, 3.5 is
ancient. If you want to find out whether a client is floating,
read /tag/sel/index and see if it's in the '~' area.

>If you're curious my use case is this: I've implemented
>http://hashapass.com as a keyboard shortcut, and use GNOME's zenity to
>get the param/pass combo from the user (dmenu would be slicker but it
>doesn't supporting hiding the password);

I'd use ssh-askpass or pinentry. It's interesting that you use
dmenu, since wmii 3.5 didn't (and 3.9 doesn't).

>for some reason all zenity windows launched by my keyboard
>shortcut end up tiled, though all ones launched by dmenu or
>from a terminal don't. What I'd like to do is pick up the
>CreateClient event and float it only if the created client is
>the one I just started from my script.

This is indeed strange, but I'd expect tagrules to do exactly
what you want. In newer versions, I'd suggest wihack, although
I'm reminded it lacks a man page...

>On a theory I even tried setting it's tag to "~" but wmii just ignored me:
>$ echo -n '~' | wmiir write /client/sel/tags
>$ wmiir read /client/sel/tags
>1$

It doesn't actually show up in the tags file, but it has the
same effect.

>I've read the latest doc that comes with the 3.9beta (wmii.pdf) and
>though the commands have changed, it seems that there still is only a
>way to toggle a window in and out of floating.
>
>So is there something I'm missing? Is this planned for inclusion in a
>future release? Else, can I request this as a feature?

See above.

>And an obligatory thanks for wmii! I've been using it since 2.x and it
>makes me happy how natural it all is.

Thanks, that's always nice to hear.

-- 
Kris Maglione
An organisation that treats its programmers as morons will soon have
programmers that are willing and able to act like morons only.
	--Bjarne Stroustrup