[Xmonad] Re: Switching focus without pulling hidden windows into the foreground

[David Roundy]

On Thu, Aug 02, 2007 at 09:42:49AM -0500, Spencer Janssen wrote:
> On Wednesday 01 August 2007 15:25:47 David Roundy wrote:
> > Tabbed hides
> > windows by moving them to the back of the stack (i.e. so they are behind
> > the focussed window), rather than by actually making them not visible.
> 
> Out of curiosity: why does it do this?

It does this so Combo will work in combination with Tabbed (which is my
normal layout).  Without this behavior, Combo would need to keep track of
which window was last visible within each sub-layout, so as to create a
proper stack with that window having the appropriate focus.  This is more
book-keeping than I care to bother with, so I just use SimpleStacking.

What Combo really wants is recursive Stacks, but reimplementing all of
Operations in Combo is also more effort than I want to bother with.

i.e. what I wish for would be something like:

data Stack a = Singleton a | Stack [Stack a] (Stack a) [Stack a]

so that you could describe a hierarchy of ordered window groupings with
a given group focussed at each level.  But we don't have that, so I need
to approximate it, one way or another.  I chose what seems to me to be the
easiest approach--which is partly historical, since SimpleStacking used to
be the default, built-in stacking approach.
-- 
David Roundy
Department of Physics
Oregon State University