Re: [dwm] and now for something completely different...

On Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 11:34 AM, y i y u s <yiyu.jgl_AT_gmail.com> wrote:

> Well, I have been thinking about the last dwm changes and I don't like
> the new monocle thing. I have decided that I don't use different
> layouts at all, so I have highly patched current hg tip to suit my
> needs.
> The patch is a bit dirty (there are things which can be improved, and
> I have included my personal configuration). I know official dwm won't
> behave this way, but maybe you can get some ideas from this patch.
> Basically it removes the layouts concept, for me togglefloating is
> enough. I also don't need monocle, a single function suffices (now it
> is called togglemax, it should be maximize, but ok). I have also
> included some mouse functions in the bar. Probably you can have
> problems in xinerama, but I cannot test it.
> I'd like to hear your opinion, because once 4.8 is released I plan to
> split it up in several patches if people have interest...
>
> slds,
>
> --
>
>
I would like to know how diverse are the people on the list in terms of the
actual layouts and dwm features they use... that will be good feedback for
all of us to know about the way dwm is patched and used by the community. I
see value in allowing more people to be able to _easily_ patch dwm for their
needs and be able to learn from it and incorporate essential features in
dwm.

I personally patch dwm so that I can easily restrict the *number* of windows
that are shown in the stack layout. Its based on pancake's older
clientspertag patches and shows in the status bar how many windows are
hidden from view. Now, restricting the number of windows to 1 easily makes
it full screen... and at the cost of a bit of elegance in the code I was
able to hack in a monocle behavior for this particular case of limiting the
number of displayed windows to 1.

Now, the monocle behavior touched focusnext() and focusprev() and I also
touched drawbar() to show the number of hidden windows... I couldn't get all
this done cleanly separated in tile(). The point I am trying to make is that
if a lot of people patch dwm.c for whatever functionality they need then we
didn't do a good job in dwm.c to help abstract and modularize things. Also,
the one thing that is modularized and abstracted out in dwm, through the
variable layout[], is the function tile() which I haven't modified heavily.

I am not suggesting delaying 4.8 but I guess a good strategy going forward
will be to get a feel of what kind of things the audience on this list like
to modify about dwm and what's dwm's core. We should do something to cleanly
separate *those* things in dwm. IMHO tile is definitely not a good choice...
I would even argue that fitting Xinerama layouts in core dwm is also a step
in the wrong direction.

_r
Received on Fri Mar 07 2008 - 04:57:48 UTC