Re: [wmii] wmiirc snippet: tag comments

Hello,

I just wanted to let you know how I use tagging in dwm.

By default, dwm comes with a fixed set of 9 numeric tags.
They are defined at compile time, because dwm
provides no way to create a new tag or to remove an unused tag
during runtime.

The amount of 9 distinct tags seems to provide a sufficient
number of distinct symbols you can remember. Usually there are
up to 6 unused tags. Only in very rare scenarios I ended up
with 7 tags in use, e.g. when heavily working in a multi-hosted
development environment.

When thinking about how to predefine tag names I'm
going to use, I regularly concluded that those names are
misleading, wrong or simply feel too unflexible. For instance,
when I choosed something like "net", "local", "work",
"misc", "www", "mail", "irc" as my tag set, I regularly
ended up with terminals editing a local file with the
tags "net" and "work", a terminal with editing a remote
file tagged with "local" or "www", etc.

So what I noticed is, that I use tagging in a more fluent way
with nearly no semantic meaning of the tag names on their own.
It won't matter for me if the tags would be a, b, c, d, e, f, g,
h, i instead of 1, 2, 3, - or just chess figures, skat
figures or even some small icons. I only need a certain number
of distinct keys to use tagging.

That way, I also don't need to retag a window when its semantic
context changes (e.g. when ssh'ing to a different box or just
editing a mail). Whenever I notice that I got too much windows
in my view, I additionally tag those windows I want to
concentrate on further with the next free tag and bring that in
view. So I can switch between two sets, the current context and
the context I want to concentrate on very easy - and without
misleading tag names which would enforce some special meaning.
Usually the last used tag is the set I concentrate on. The
previous ones are of a more global or misc scope.

Well that's not totally true, I got used to the exception that
my browser windows end up tagged with 3, maybe I will change
that someday, to have at least for browser windows a semantic
www tag - which is the only real non-terminal app I heavily use.

Besides this, dwm provides the ability to view more than a
single tag at a time, you can view all tags alltogether to bring
all existing windows into view. So this might be a reason for
the more fluent use of tags in dwm than in wmii, but this thesis
might be wrong.

Regards,

-- 
 Anselm R. Garbe >< http://www.suckless.org/ >< GPG key: 0D73F361