Re: [dwm] dwm's future

On Sat 25 Apr 2009 - 07:23PM, Anselm R Garbe wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> I discussed several stuff on IRC recently but wanted to share my thoughts here.
>
> 1. One idea is getting rid of the dwm bar altogether and to print the
> dwm state to stdout when it changes, however after thinking carefully
> about it I conclude that having the bar build-in is definately a
> stayer. It's so much simpler than the hassle with an external bar, not
> worth it. So very unlikely.

Don't know how I myself feel about this, but just going to throw it out
there... how about a modular plugin-like system? simplify dwm to just
call hook lists at various places, and then move the status bar into
statusbar.c (or config.h if you're crazy)

> 2. Another idea is to switch to another dependency for the rendering
> bit which could possibly be cairo. After all I'm nearly giving up the
> hope that X font handling will ever be fixed and work properly, so
> that relying on a pile of other crap seems to become a solution. cairo
> is a dependency for firefox and I guess that every dwm user uses
> firefox occasionally. And we might benefit from a little bit smoother
> looking dwm (same for dmenu of course and my ongoing st efforts). I
> think this idea is quite likely.

I think that the plugin system has even more merit in light of this, dwm
can stay clean and simple, and the new statusbar.c can expand to have
pretty fonts without affecting the size/complexity of dwm.c

> 3. A third idea for legacy support is, that I tend to add a
> compile-time option or a specific Rule extension that let's you set to
> reparent all clients or certain clients which are broken such as
> Mathematica or various Swing apps, though I'm not absolutely sure how
> likely that is. Somehow my inner feelings are against it, because it's
> not a dwm problem and those broken apps should be fixed.
>
> Please feel free to comment or add other ideas to this list.
>
> Kind regards,
> --Anselm
>
Received on Sat Apr 25 2009 - 20:55:06 UTC