[Xmonad] floating layer questions

Donald Bruce Stewart dons at cse.unsw.edu.au
Sun Jun 10 05:48:21 EDT 2007


Hi Avi!

First off, I should just point out the floating layer is a bit
experimental -- nothing's fixed in stone yet, and there's some obvious
things that need fixing/tweaking.

>    I'm having trouble using apps with floating windows.  It seems that
>    the only way to move an application to the floating layer is by
>    resizing/moving with the mouse - how do I use keyboard to do this

Right. Currently that is the only way (or for the window to be marked as
'transient').

A naive mod-shift-t that calls 'float' on the window is pretty easy to
write, but its not so useful. Really, the window also has to be moved /
resized, to be noticeably in the floating layer.

Perhaps file a bug report, that there's no way to float a window from
the keyboard? Then we'll be forced to rememb^h^h^ addres this before 0.3
comes out in a few weeks.

>    (how about alt-shift-t, to counteract alt-t, or just toggle with
>    alt-t)?  Is there a way to launch an application directly into the
>    floating layer? this would help with applications that open many

Currently no. But there's an open ticket to add filters to the 'manage'
function, so you can specify a list of workspaces/layers/actions to do
when particular applications open up.

>    windows.  note: with wmii I just need to change focus to the
>    floating layer (even when empty) with alt-space before launching an
>    app (e.g. from dmenu with alt-p, or from an xterm that's already

Hmm. That's an interesting way to think about it. We could certainly 
have an 'insert' that shifts focus between layers. It would require
status bar support, to tag which layer was in focus. 

I think probably this won't be the default behaviour, but it should be
simple enough to write as a contrib module -- after we finsih the
StackSet rewrite that is underway to fully support floating layers
properly.

>    floating).  I'm pretty clueless about Haskell, so, at the moment, I
>    can only nag about features/questions.  I expect this will change
>    soon enough, but until then - please be gentle :-)

Thanks for the feedback! You raise some good issues. Let me just confirm
I've summarised them correctly, and the action we'll be taking:

    1) floating status should be accesible from the keyboard (will be looked at)

    2) certain apps should always be floating (to be added)

    3) which apps are floating by default should be configurable (to be added)

    4) ponder 'floating layer focus' as a simple way to ensure a window
    starts floating. (useful idea to look at)

So, stay tuned. Most of these we're already looking at, or actively
writing code for :-)

-- Don


More information about the Xmonad mailing list