[Xmonad] the future of xmonad...

[Stefan O'Rear]

On Sun, Jun 10, 2007 at 01:21:09PM +1000, Donald Bruce Stewart wrote:
> > I've been hacking xmonad a bit, but really shouldn't be.  This morning I
> > was seeing about starting in on a tabbed layout.  The trouble I'm running
> > into is that xmonad currently has no code that involves drawing to the
> > screen, so there's no examples to modify! The other trouble is that it
> > seems like we'd need quite a bit of infrastructure to support drawing on
> 
> Hmm yes, so contrib modules that do decorations -- we'd need to work out
> how to do that. The best place to start woudl be to look at ion or wmii,
> I suspect, to find out the X calls to make, and transliterate t code.

It doesn't need to be specific to decorations per se.  For instance, you
can do decorations using a event dispatch system and a means of
notifying when to take down the decorations; such as my +14 line patch
(which provides an extensible list of event hooks and a refresh notify),
or Janssen's proposal to give Setup and Teardown and Events as layout
messages.

(shameless advertizing) I think my approach is better because it can be
used by non-layout code easily.  For instance a root menu (which must be
in the same process that does the grab due to X protocol limitations)
could be done.

Stefan