Re: [wmii] suggestions for the sanitizing of swapping

On Mon, May 08, 2006 at 10:31:59AM +0200, Stefan Tibus wrote:
> The only problem swapping currently has is the lack of visual
> representation of the swapping target. I think here we have to
> get a bit more creative than just highlighting the tags but not
> the full title bar or adding a sign to it. A second less-highlighting
> color is not very creative as well, but may work as a start and
> can flexibly be set to not be too attention-rising. Regarding the
> question "where does my focus go?" this is not as relevant, but
> would help as well. So it's not just for swapping. Since there is
> a selected client in unselected columns there should be some
> representation for it (and then unpredictability is gone).

http://wmii.de/shots/20060508.png

(After a day of working with this, it feels pretty predictable
to me, to say what the target-column is).

> Entirely removing swapping of wmii is not a good idea, and even
> less good if its current unpredictability and some lines of code are
> the only reasons to do so. Swapping offers a well-usable functionality
> which is not easily replaced by several moves! And being open-
> minded one should see this point. Who ever really used all features
> of the software he uses? It's good to remove useless ones, but
> not-used-by-everyone does not imply they're useless...

My intention for removing swapping is not the LOC which can be
safed (that is really a marginal aspect). It is the simplicity
of the overall column concept and the usage patterns which are
involved with it. Having a basic and simple move-only based
concept means, that people use it the same way, which is
important for future development, documentation, tutorials, etc.

The date of this decision is also very important, because there
are only a bunch of people using rc2 atm (there are more people
still using wmii-2.5.x). Thus, if the release contains swapping,
those people will stick to the swapping approach, because they
got used to the wmii-2.5.x way. Those people won't have a chance
to change their mind like me, because there is swapping. And the
swapping which exists is indeed more general and adapts better
to the column approach than the LarsWM way, but it is
sub-optimal compared to the LarsWM way.

Hence, except newbies, wmii-2.x-users won't adapt to the move-only
approach I explored so far and they will use their environment in a
different and sub-optimal way. They will complain about the lack
of dynamicness in the swapping approach and ask again and again
to get such a freeze or exclusive flag for columns, which would
make the concept much more complex and less predictable than
explicit swap commands (I discovered this beside several other
early adaptors in IRC, that's why we dropped the idea pretty
fast).

Also, if one compares the move-only and swapping usage patterns
to dynamic window management, it seems to me that sticking to a
static number of columns and using swapping most of the time is
less efficient than using as many columns as necessary for a
task and using the clients in the specific position as they
are (or move them if one needs them in a different place).

For inter-task specific things and task changes, I use
tagging.

Regards,

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