[wmii] Recent changes

From: Kris Maglione <maglione.k_AT_gmail.com>
Date: Sat, 18 Oct 2008 09:44:11 -0400

Hi,

In response to the last thread, and as a general announcement,
here's what's going on with the latest changes to the tree.
First of all, please report any bugs you find to the Google
issue tracker. I'm least likely to lose track of them that way.

To start with, I've replaced dmenu with ‘wimenu’. It's very
similar in appearance and behavior, but has a few significant
enhancements. The biggest user-noticable change is the addition
of an input caret. Now, you can type entire command lines
without fear of having to start from scratch when you spot a
typo. Second, it not supports command history. The -h flag
specifies a history file to load, and the -n flag, when present,
causes the menu to write back at most n history items to the
history file. Third, you no longer need (or even can) specify
colors, fonts, or positioning on the commandline. All such
settings are read directly from wmii's /ctl. The same now goes
for wmii9menu, which has also had its flags reduced to single
letters. I hope not to make many such backwards-incompatible
changes in the future. The wimenu does, and wmii9menu should in
the future, support Xinerama and XRandR. At the moment, it opens
on the screen that holds the pointer, but that will change to
the screen with the focused client.

I've also added Xinerama support, which is now usable, and seems
to be stable, but is far from complete. As some of you have
noticed, there's no way to modify the bar on the secondary
screen. There's also only limited support for managed mode on
any but the first screen. You can move clients into a column
with the mouse, and basic keyboard manipulation will work, but
the rest is yet to come. Fullscreen mode should now work fairly
well. A fullscreen client will take whichever screen most of its
window initially resides on. Floating clients don't yet care
much which screen they open on. They'll pick whichever clear
region of the screen seems smallest. XRandR screen switching
should also work. For the moment, once you add a screen, there's
no way to get rid of it. If you remove a screen, wmii will move
all of its managed clients off-screen, and there's basically no
way to get them back until you re-add the screen. In the future,
I intend for logical screens to be independent of Xinerama
screens. So, you'll be able to place any logical screen onto any
Xinerama screen, and you'll even be able to place several
logical screens onto one physical screen (so, the top may have
two columns, the bottom one, for instance). This should make it
easier to keep your managed area in order without worrying about
clients getting dumped willy-nilly when you remove a separate
monitor. I may, after some use, decide that we do, afterall,
need a way to specify a separate view for each logical screen,
but we'll see.

Comments welcome.

-- 
Kris Maglione
Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent
and well informed just to be undecided about them.
	--Laurence J. Peter
Received on Sat Oct 18 2008 - 13:44:11 UTC

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