Re: [wmii] working with multiple clients

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Suraj N. Kurapati wrote:
> I often encounter the situation where I want to temporarily take a
> bunch of clients from the current view into a new temporary view.
> Once I'm done with whatever I was doing, I need to go back to how
> things were before.
>
> Obviously the latter is already possible through tagging, however
> the former could use some work. Imagine, how would you quickly
> "select" a bunch of clients in the current view for temporary
> tagging?
>
> I would (1) enable the "I want to move some clients to a temporary
> view" action, (2) click on the clients I want or navigate around
> with keyboard and press a shortcut which "selects" the current
> client, (3) enable the "I'm finished moving the clients to temporary
> vew" action, and instantly I'm taken to the temporary view. Sounds
> like this can actually be script-able.

I realized that this problem is actually a subset of a more general problem of
not being able to manipulate more than one client at once. So, I sat down and
hacked such functionality into my wmiirc (attached).

Control-Alt-g is the prefix for keyboard shortcuts which manipulate the
selection property. (Note: I call this grouping of multiple clients as
"selection" and putting focus on a client as "focus".)

Control-Alt-g,g Toggles the selection property for the focused client.

Control-Alt-g,a Adds all clients in the current view to the selection.

Control-Alt-g,i Inverts the selection for the current view.

Control-Alt-g,n Un-selects all selected clients, in any view.

You can also click on a client's title to toggle its selection property.

When clients are selected, you will see a "SEL" tag in the bar. When there are
no selected clients, the "SEL" tag will disappear from the bar.

So, what's the result of all this? Well, now you can "select" any clients you
want and perform an operation on all of them!

For example, try this: (Note: I use DVORAK keyboard so "hjkl" is "htns")

1. Open a bunch of clients (Control-Alt-e brings up the "execute" menu).

2. Try the selection shortcuts listed above, and select some clients.

3. Move the selected clients to the left: (Control-Alt-m,h)

4. Move the selected clients to the floating area: (Control-Alt-m,space)

5. And back to the ground again: (Control-Alt-m,space)

6. Append a tag "foo" to the selection: (Control-Alt-m,t type "+foo")

And while you're here, try the tiling and gridding view arrangements:

7. Apply tiling arrangement (Control-Alt-z,t)

8. Apply grid arrangement (Control-Alt-z,g)

When you've had enough of this madness:

9. Quit the WM through the "internal" menu: (Control-Alt-i type quit)

Enjoy. :-)
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