[wmii] Understanding default mode

Hello everybody,

my everyday experience with wmii is that I usually switch to stacked mode right at the beginning. Some unstructured thoughts later I end up with several applications and two columns. One column in stacked mode, the other column is in default mode hosting most of the time one single application. On some rare occasions there are up to three application sharing the default mode column, which I find is the maximum feasible amount of visible applications.

With this observation in mind, what is the thing about default mode being default mode? Shouldn't stacked (or maximized) mode be the default mode, because with wmii and similar WMs we try to maximize screen real estate? Maybe I haven't understood default mode but the current implementation is not intuitive for me.

What do you think of modifying default mode to be a mixture of stacked mode and default mode? There could be some application sharing the column while other applications are collapsed. From the last messages on the list I've learned that there is something like collapsing (which I also thought was a bug). But the collapsed parts won't roll out if you focus them. Because of my Lalopathy, please consider the following ASCII graphics depicting three applications in the hypothetical modified default mode:

Starting with:
   -screen----------------------------
   |============= A (focus) =========|
   | |
   | |
   | |
   |============= B =================|
   | |
   | |
   | |
   |============= C (collapsed) =====|
   -----------------------------------

MOD-Down changes focus:
   -screen----------------------------
   |============= A =================|
   | |
   | |
   | |
   |============= B (focus) =========|
   | |
   | |
   | |
   |============= C (collapsed) =====|
   -----------------------------------

MOD-Down changes focus, rolls out C and collapses A:
   -screen----------------------------
   |============= A (collapsed) =====|
   |============= B =================|
   | |
   | |
   | |
   |============= C (focus) =========|
   | |
   | |
   | |
   -----------------------------------

This could be expanded to more applications and more visible regions. For a consistent HMI the column creation mechanism could be used. Starting in stacked mode one could use MOD-Shift-Up/Down to create two visible applications with the others collapsed and so on. Moving the focus results in the behaviour described above.

Probably this is nothing for release 3.7 but I would be interested how you use default mode right now and what your opinions to the modifications are.

Cheers
Thomas

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