Re: [wmii] Stacks

> Well, sounds like an page id <-> tag mapping, no big deal. But
> we can think about it after wmii-3 if it would make sense.
No, you got it wrong, there just would not be any page ids anymore!

Actually pages would not exist at all! Think:
echo setws email > /wmii/ctl
swaps to a "virtual ws" with all the clients that have that tag.
echo setws email+irc > /emii/ctl
makes visible all clients that have the email or irc tags and hides
everything else.

And I found a fundamental flaw in this idea, would be nice... except
you actually need to keep track of pages for how all the clients are
positioned and organized in each page, in virtual pages there would
not be any way to maintain a layout, which is very dynamic and also
very stupid and useless.

Well, I guess we could keep track of what the layout under a certain
name(set of tags) did look like, can't be much data should grow very
little if at all, and it can easily be garbage-collected when no
client has any of the the tags for that 'virtualws'. This would make
things certainly much more dynamic, but it would make it impossible to
list
all available ws, only way would be to make them up on the fly (ie.,
associate key bindings to commands like I described before), and one
could easily list all tags currently in use, so maybe it's not such a
big deal(you could have a on-the-fly-pager which would do just that
and allow you to click on any of the available tags)

>
> > [BTW, once more, why the hell we have "pages" and not "workspaces"?
> > it's confusing and senseless]
>
> I'm open to change it to something else. The original reason I
> called them 'pages' is because the tiny tool which shows your
> 'workspaces' in WIMPish environments is called 'pager' and not
> 'workspacer'. Also the term 'workspace' is somewhat misleading
> because it implies some static understanding of managing windows
> in different places. If we're going to adapt you ideas after
> wmii-3 and make such 'pages' something like dynamic groups of
> referenced clients the 'page' term would also be rather static.
> Dunno of 'container', 'layout' or 'vscreen' would be better
> terms. Would be interesting to hear comments from native
> speakers about this question.
No, call it ws, that is what everyone calls it, and it just makes
sense. Page is much more misleading because it comes directly from the
brainamaged "desktop" metaphor.

> Well, as I told, in the end it is a minor change, because you
> would just keep arbitrary references to globally available
> clients in such 'workspaces', 'tag-groups' or how you might want
> to call them. The interesting point about it is, that you could
> drop the sendto pattern completely (except for rearranging in
> columns which needs some function to move a client into another
> column). The first step in this direction is already with the
> removal of the detach/attach usage pattern.
Actually, you got it backwards, there are no 'tag-groups' except the
current set of visible tags. The references would be in the other
direction, from the clients, to their own private list of tag names,
when switching the list of currently visible tags, you would go
through all windows and show the ones that match.

And yes, I suspect this would simplify and generalize the sendto
system, to send the selected client to the email 'virtual-ws'(again,
this ws would not exist anywhere, would only exist once one sets the
'current tags' to something that contains "email")
echo email > /wmii/client/current/tags
To add the client to an existing virtual-ws but without making it go away:
echo email >> /wmii/client/current/tags

(I'm talking about virtual-ws in a metaphorical way, as I said, there
is no such thing, except maybe as a cache of layout of windows once it
has been made the active set of tags once)

> I'm not sure, but when thinking about your idea it sounds
> more and more interesting. In the end it just allows things like
> sticky windows in a very natural way, because tagged clients may
> occur in different pages...
Yes, you could allow even wildcards in the tag names, so a client with
a tag of '*' would match any selection and always show up (I think
here a special case should be made if that client is floating, it's
layout should be made 'universal' and not keep in per-virtual-ws and
instead associated directly with the client)

uriel
Received on Fri Mar 03 2006 - 11:56:02 UTC