Re: [wmii] Whither wmi?

I can understand your points and I agree to some.

On Mon, Oct 24, 2005 at 10:20:18PM -0400, Karl Guertin wrote:
> On 10/24/05, Anselm R. Garbe <garbeam_AT_wmii.de> wrote:
> > On Mon, Oct 24, 2005 at 05:42:02PM -0400, Karl Guertin wrote:
> > No, feel free to post the list. I'd be interested. Actually
> > things still evolve and will change due to the upcoming column
> > layout and the silent switch to 9p2k capable servers in the
> > wmii-3 release soon.

[...]

> (turns out there was no xterm on the system), why mozilla launches
> instead of firefox, etc. The big problem with the config system is
> that its made up of pseudo-files. This means two things: 1. that the
> interesting bits of config are scattered in small pieces throughout a
> data structure that is far more opaque than a flat config file and 2.
> because the files aren't real files, I can't do real file stuff with
> them like grep, find, vim, etc, but rather have to do everything
> through wmir, which leads to 3. excessively verbose/ugly config files.
> I think this is a known problem and it looks like the snapshot config
> stuff is simpler. I have no problem with everything being files, but I
> don't have tools to efficiently manipulate a huge number of tiny
> files. If there were some way to aggregate the files (like the
> directories as files plugins talked about for reiser4) or the files
> plugged into something like leo (http://leo.sf.net), it wouldn't be so
> painful.

The configuration system has changed drastically since wmii-2
and is much more simple now. Even simplier than the wmi-10 way, because
configuration is done in a single file now (wmirc action).

> I repeat that I want wmii to behave like wmi. The inital frame takes
> up the whole screen, additional windows appear in the same frame,
> split, join, move north,south,east,west, alt+tab switches only within
> the frame, etc. Now that I've had time to cool down and think about it
> some more, I think that I can script the system in python to get the
> behavior I want, but I'm hoping that someone else has run into the
> same problems, has solved them, and can cut down on the amount of work
> I have to do in configuration.

The new (revised) layout interface for the column layout has
been defined to be able to realize these requirements, because
another user wanted to hack such wmi-10 layout for wmii based on
the new interface (which might be around 150 LOC) sometime ago.
And I suspect he'll do so.

Until this layout might appear someday, at least as contrib patch,
wmii-3 will come with column + max + float layouts, tiled, vsplit
and grid will disappear (cause column is flexibel and general way).

Anyway, the hybrid page concept has been dropped more or less.
Each page contains a managed (layouted) and a floating area, whereas
the managed is optional, and if present always in the bottom, to
reduce clunky patterns for subdesktop switching found in LarsWM
and wmi-10.

> I can see how you can gain productivity now that you have a tacit way
> to toggle between two apps with alt+enter (which is a feature I like
> btw), but I gain no benefit over my highly regimented system.

The main reason to me is, that you're forced to use WIMP-apps,
same with me, but they fit badly in dynamic window management
world.

Regards,

-- 
 Anselm R. Garbe  ><><  www.ebrag.de  ><><  GPG key: 0D73F361