[Xmonad] dragging in X instead of IO

[mgsloan]

This would be quite good.

Have you seen my FlexibleManipulate contrib? (I suppose it might be
rather hard, when you don't have internet).  It allows grabbing
locations on floating windows to drag+resize them.  It's also rather
crazy, as in the default, 'linear' mode (specified by a passed in
distribution function), the closer you are to the center, the more you
are positioning, the closer to the edge, the more you are resizing.
The discrete mode is much more rational and probably better (splits
each axis into thirds, so there's 9 regions per window).

Other than much more natural window manipulation, benefits include
only requiring one mouse button and not warping the mouse to a corner.

Perhaps something like FlexibleManipulate's discrete mode could be
used for resizing in xmonad.

-Michael Sloan

On 8/6/07, David Roundy <droundy at darcs.net> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I've done a bit of xmonad hacking at home recently (where I no longer have
> an internet connection), and thought I'd mention what I've done, and see
> what other developers think.
>
> Basically, I've been hacking on the dragging code, which seems pretty ugly
> to me.  I added a "dragging" datum of type
>
>  Maybe (Position -> Position -> X (), X ())
>
> which is usually Nothing, but if we're in the process of dragging
> something, the first is a callback function for motion events, and the
> second is a callback for the button release event (which is assumed to
> terminate the dragging).
>
> The result is that moving and resizing windows doesn't interrupt xmonad's
> regular event loop, and means (among other things) that tabs get redrawn
> while moving float windows (for instance if the float window gets moved
> over the tab like an eraser).  This is a bugfix, but not of a very relevant
> bug.
>
> The real motivation is to allow dragging interactions as a first-class UI
> citizen.  In particular, I would like to have a draggable version of
> TwoPane, which would send special resize Messages as the user drags the
> border between the two panes.  This will be particularly helpful with Combo
> layouts, since I haven't found a useful way to make the keyboard bindings
> for resizing panes work with Combo (no useful way to tell which Layout
> you're talking to).  But it's also nice for just a vanilla TwoPane (except
> I'm making a new Layout, of course, so you happy TwoPane users won't be
> bothered), since the mouse has considerably higher bandwidth than the
> keyboard (i.e. there isn't the tradeoff between a high delta so you can
> quickly resize and a low delta so you can accurately resize).
>
> It'd also be handy for things like a XMonadContrib floating layout with
> title bars on the windows (which would hopefully eventually be a candidate
> for replacing the default float layout via Config modification).
>
> Anyhow, since this is a change in a pretty core bit of xmonad, I thought I
> should mention it, even though I can't yet send in patches.  Suggestions
> will be welcome (or someone who wants to reimplement this
> themselves... since I won't be able to read any suggestions at home...).
> I'll be back into the world of home internet connectivity after I move in a
> couple of weeks, so that's when you can expect to get patches (I could
> bring my laptop into work, but I'm really busy just now...).
> --
> David Roundy
> Department of Physics
> Oregon State University
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