[dwm] zooming a client by name

Hi,

I've just discovered dwm. (For some reason, whilst I
got the 10kloc project announcement it didn't occur to
me that a window manager would be one of the
elements.) Trying it I like it a lot (particularly
only putting a small overlay title on non-focussed
windows).

There's only one thing that for me is a real absence:
a way to use the name (as in XWindow title) to request
a client be focussed. Now, this is undoubtedly partly
due to me having a lot of editor windows open, each
containing a separate file. However, I think it might
be a useful facility for other windows, eg, when
you've got multiple terminals open, etc.

dwm is small enough that I will probably have a go at
implementing this (very scarce spare time permitting
:-) ). What I'm just hoping to initiate in this e-mail
is a enough discussion to know if (a) such a feature
would be accepted into the main distribution and (b)
what architecture would be viewed as suitable.

As far as I can see, there are two core requirements:

(1) A way to ask dwm to output the names of the titles
of all the windows with the currently active tag.

(2) A way to ask dwm to focus a window whose title is
the same as a given one.

The actual making of choices by the user can then be
done by an external program (eg, something using
dmenu). This both enables independent development of
picking mechanism from the mainstream dwm and also
means most of what might be considered "bloat" code
doesn't go into dwm, just the essentials for getting
the information in and out.

>From my philosophy, providing it fails gracefully,
there's no need to get corner cases "perfect". Off the
top of my head, these corner cases include the race
between getting the list of names and submitting the
focus request where a client exits, or changes its
title between times, or gets retagged. Likewise if
there's multiple clients with the same title.

Does anyone (particularly garbeam) have any comments,
suggestions, flames?

(BTW: dwm survived my "open many more windows than
will fit in the slave column" test, dropping back to
client-fills-column: cool!)

cheers, dave tweed

                
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Received on Tue Aug 08 2006 - 15:56:09 UTC