Re: [wmii] Identifying the selected client

On Mon, Apr 24, 2006 at 12:20:26AM +0100, David Tweed wrote:
>
> --- Bartosz Trudnowski <hrr888_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > On 4/23/06, Anselm R. Garbe <garbeam_AT_wmii.de> wrote:
> > >
> > > On Sun, Apr 23, 2006 at 09:41:02PM +0100, David
> > Tweed wrote:
> > > > This would be pretty useful for programs which
> > want
> > > > the window manager to do their tiling for them.
> > One
> > > > question: so I've got a program with multiple
> > windows,
> > > > can the program in some way find out the mapping
> > from
> > > > XWindow stuff it knows about to the wmii
> > identifier?
> > >
> > > Only if we'd use the window id, otherwise the
> > internal wmii
> > > identifier is wmii-specific (basically a value
> > which is unique,
> > > but increased for each new window).
>
> Just to be clear: what I'm thinking about is that the
> program wants to do something with a window (change
> its tag, or something). At the moment it could only do
> this when that window is the selected window, but that
> restricts the program in that it's got to be sure that

No that is not true. You can access any client atm regardless if
it is selected or not. The only problem is, that you have to
know the client and without a unique id representation in the fs
this is impossible. That's why I propose

/client/<id>/ and /view/sel/sel/id as solution.

> the window it wants to do something with is the
> _currently_ selected window. Apart from anything else,
> presumably that opens up a theoretical race if the
> user switches windows before the program does the
> write to the filesystem. So being able to write stuff
> about windows by some stable identifier to wmii is
> useful, but needs some way for the program to find out
> what wmii is calling this window.

Exactly, see above.

> You're saying there's no way for a program to find
> this out?

Atm not.

> All this is `inspired' on my non-mainstream viewpoint
> that it'd be useful to have applications which
> delegate actually doing window
> tiling/columns/focus/whatever to the window manager,
> but which do send requests to do various interesting
> things (eg, split the current column) to the wm. (This

That might be possible for floating windows in the future.

Regards,

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