[wmii] emacs minibuffer frame

Hi

I have been using wmii for quite a long time now and am very satisfied
with it. An other application I use a lot is emacs.

By default emacs displays a minibuffer at the bottom of each window
wasting some screen real estate.

In case you are not familiar with emacs let me explain some terminology:

* Minibuffers are a lot like dmenu. They are used to interactively
read some input from the user.
* A frame is what you call a client.
* Frames can be split into multiple windows. So emacs-frame=x11-window
and emacs-window=something we don't have to worry about in this
context.

So in other words: in emacs each client has an input-area, called
minibuffer, at the buttom.

However it is possible to have only one minibuffer which is "linked"
to whatever emacs client has focus. So if you invoke some command in
an emacs client that needs to read input from the user the minibuffer
gets focus and knows which client it acts on.

The problem is that I can't put the minibuffer anywhere in wmii. If I
just make it a floating client it will cover up parts of other clients
that it shouldn't.

Since it is much like dmenu the logical thing to do would be to have
wmii treat it like dmenu.

So what I am hoping for is that when a client containing the
minibuffer is created, wmii detects that and places it above dmenu,
reducing the space available for managed clients.

Then of course it would be nice if wmii only did that for views that
contain emacs clients, but that is probably not so easy and not
required to get started.

It would even improve my user experience if wmii would simply add some
space above dmenu, where I could manually put the minibuffer client.

But of course I would prefer it if wmii would just treat the
minibuffer client as a menu just like dmenu.

So I guess this boils down to: how can I display multiple menus (dmenu
and the minibuffer) at the same time, and how do I let wmii know that
the minibuffer is such a menu?

Many thanks for your help

-- Jonas
Received on Thu Jul 24 2008 - 14:46:02 UTC