Re: [wmii] Swapping (was: Re: mouse and tagging)

On Thu, May 04, 2006 at 05:11:51PM +0200, Stefan Tibus wrote:
> client in the not selected column is. Actually there is information
> involved which is stored within wmii, but not represented
> graphically: the selected client in a not-selected column! Sometimes
> I'd like to know which one it is...(just an idea for wmii-4)

I see your concerns. The graphical representation is a todo for
wmii-4 already (we thought about generalizing the max mode label
to provide more info in all cases).

> Also, I don't think you can judge actual usage of a feature by
> following discussions. I still like the larswm way a lot, but I'm
> not going to tell this over and over again. And there may be a lot
> of people not participating in the observed discussions...

My main concern with swapping is, that I never used it regularly.

Last year, when I implemented the prototype of column layout I
put swapping to it, because I still was pretty much used to the
wmii-2.x and wmii-2.5.x way of layouts (especially tiled
layout). By that time I used swapping much more frequently than
today.

However, in the meanwhile I re-implemented the column layout
nearly from scratch, and originally this re-implementation
didn't contained swapping. It was based on move only for quite a
long time (I think between January and early April). Because I'm
always using hg tip, I wasn't able to use swapping during this
period of time and discovered totally different usage patterns
of columns, primary I run 2-3 columns with stacking mode and
move a client into a new column temporarily if I need a bunch of
clients side by side. Since the day I added swapping, I used it
regularly for restacking columns in a vertical manner, but the
Control-based shortcut annoyed me all along the way, it seems to
be counter-intuitive to 'move' clients vertically with a
different modifier than doing it horizontally... Maybe I swapped
clients horizontally a few times as well, but I cannot consider
this as regular interaction anymore, which has been the case for
wmii-2.X.

I think people who use swapping frequently are still pretty much
used to the LarsWM- or tiled-layout way of thinking. But I
noticed that one can change the mind and adapt to the move-only
based approach fairly easily. I also noticed that there are
reasons why acme does not contain swapping. Once you are used to
the move-only approach you don't feel the need to swap clients
horizontally anymore (within columns you use and need it in acme
anyways), but not among columns. Hence in acme one won't say
that you swap clients vertically, because you can explicitely
move clients at a specific position and that is currently
missing in wmii with moving within a column.

I totally agree that mouse-based moving and keyboard-based
horizontal swapping are pretty unpredictable atm, and this
should be fixed till wmii-3. Currently my favorized way looks as
follows:

- remove swapping, merge keyboard-based vertical swapping into
  move
- improve mouse-based moving as follows: always attach the
  client which is moved within or to a different column before
  the client the pointer points to (and not at the end as it is
  done in keyboard-driven mode)

This would simplify the overall concept drastically and contain
a more production-ready mouse-based move. We would get rid of 5
Shortcuts, namely:

$MODKEY-Control-{h,j,k,l} and $MODKEY-Button2

beside a bunch of code.

Regards,

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