Re: [wmii] Some ideas of layouts

On Tue, Jan 10, 2006 at 08:54:05AM +0100, Stefan Tibus wrote:
> - creation of empty frames:
> Creating an empty frame that may be selected and a new
> client is automatically attached to that frame, seems
> more natural to me.

That is possible, but I never was a fan of this, because this
sounds like a static layout. And if you always set up a static
layout, it is easy to use special (fixed) sizes for all windows
from a script which use just floating layout only.

> - stacking of frames:
> Remembers me of larswm's way to handle managed and
> floating windows. Sometimes I found myself of having
> a floating window in front of managed ones and clicking
> on the latter doesn't rise them. This is unexpected and
> there's need to switch at least between a managed and
> an unmanaged layer.
> Jani extends this to multiple stackable layers or frames.
> Wether or not it is useful to handle floating windows
> as managed windows without boundary conditions I'm not
> sure. One would a have a lot of empty (but selectable?)
> frames.

We simplified the concept in wmii, because we don't want to
allow layer toggles between floating and managed area for
several reasons. First such thing is an additional layer, thus
an accelerator of complexity. Second it is in general a bad idea
to mix up a desktop with managed and floating clients. The
floating area exists in managed areas, because we need a sane
way for so called transient windows (which are popup windows
mostly), and which are only attached temporarily. Due the fact,
that you can resize the managed area smaller than the whole
screen resolution, you can reserve some space for a floating
monitoring tool, which might be sticky and visible among all
pages. If you run broken apps, it is highly recommended to
create a page for them.

> Other ideas:
> - resizing:
> I'm missing resizing features for floating windows only.
> Larswm has shortcuts to toggle vertical, horizontal and
> full screen maximization. One can do the maximization
> with wmii as well, but not switch back to the normal
> size afterwards.

Thats correct for wmii-2.x, but planned for wmii-3. It is up to
the layout to remember a specific previous size of a frame.

> - tiling:
> I liked larswm's tiling mode a lot. Have your focused
> window in the largest/main frame and stack others away.
> If resizing of the other frames is disabled even
> terminals keep there full content when moving them to
> the main frame again. Are there other ways to achieve
> this?

To me the tiled layout is pretty much similiar to LarsWM. Even
in LarsWM you were able to focus a stacked client, thus it is
not correct, that always the master tile was focused. With
M-Return you zoom focused clients into the master tile, maybe
you missed this feature.

> - mouse focus:
> Make the sloppy focus configurable.

Agreed, several guys with borken touchpads complaint. It is on
TODO.

Regards,

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