Re: [wmii] Re: layout per tag.

On Fri, Aug 11, 2006 at 10:25:29AM -0400, Ross Mohn wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-08-11 at 16:00 +0200, Sander van Dijk wrote:
> > On 8/11/06, Bill Puschmann <puschy_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
> > > But that's exactly the point. These are not workspaces. These are "tags
> > > currently in use". Part of the effort of WMII is to rethink a lot of the
> > > desktop metaphors that currently exist. That's also part of the "dynamic"
> > > nature of this window manager - it shows you what's currently available and
> > > changes as appropriate.
> > > By selecting a tag, you're not saying "Show me the Mail workspace" - you're
> > > saying "show me all the windows tagged as 'Mail' on the one and only
> > > workspace that I have".
> >
> > Exactly. Tags != workspaces. Those things in the bottomleft of your
> > screen in wmii are not workspaces, strictly taken not even views, they
> > are the individual tags that you have currently given to at least one
> > window, and the highlighted one indicates what is currently visible.
> > In the desktop/workspace paradigm, each workspace should be thought of
> > as a separate 'desk', so you're working at multiple 'desks' at the
> > same time (in real life you'd need quite a big room to do this).
> > In the the tagging paradigm, there is just one desktop/workspace,
> > where you put certain tags/labels on each individual window, and tell
> > the computer something like "now clean my desk, leave only the windows
> > with label 'mail' on it" (which is, I believe, closer to the real life
> > situation; so in a certain way, wmii is actually a better
> > implementation of the 'desktop methaphor' than most DE's ;-). ..
> One thing I've thought was missing (or maybe it's there and I don't know
> how to do it?) is the ability to say that I want to view on my desktop
> everything with the tags "mail" and "net". Rather than having to give
> multiple tags to the clients, I'd like the ability to dump everything on
> my desktop that has either of these tags. Specify a regexp to describe
> which tags I want to view --> mail|net. Can I do that?
>
> Those things in the bottomleft of the screen are just shortcuts for
> viewing all clients of one tag.

There have been experimental implementations in wmii-3- for
this. However, there are two problems with this approach. First
of all, it adds redundancy, because the behavior can be achieved
through (un)applying a 'join' tag to all clients tagged with
either 'mail' or 'net'. Second, which is actually the main
reason I dropped the idea, is, that it is quite complex to
remember geometry information for such kind of views. Besides
this there are plenty corner cases what todo if a new client is
started while in the view 'mail|net' - in this case it is quite
complex to tag a new client who inherits the current view name
accordingly with both, mail and net (actually it is possible
through iterating all existing tags and checking if the
regexp matches). But the main reason has been geomtry
information caching. For a simple but dynamic window management
model like dwm implements, it would be easy to implement such
stuff (however, for the dwm side of life there don't exist any
input methods to supply such dynamic regexp to windows atm.).
Maybe it would be worth thinking about this approach further,
dunno.

Regards,

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