[Xmonad] darcs patch: first shot at a floating layer

[Donald Bruce Stewart]

xmonad:
> dons at cse.unsw.edu.au (Donald Bruce Stewart) writes:
> 
> [...]
> 
> > In fact, this is really nice! Great work Jason. This is very exciting:
> > it makes some apps (gimp!) a lot more usable.
> 
> I agree.  Transient frames work nicely.  More nicely than with ion3,
> actually (in ion3 I think there's only one floating layer, so
> transients were visible in all workspaces which is often irritating).

I agree.
  
> It makes using things like gkrellm possible: I can start it, and then
> conveniently float it somewhere out of the way.  On the other hand,
> for things like gkrellm, I really *want* that to remain visible when I
> switch workspaces.

Almost certainly this sets the override-redirect property, and you can
thus put it in the status bar gap xmonad allows for.
  
> Maybe there's a place for a per-screen decoration layer, always
> visible, in which I can stick clocks, status bars, GNOME panels, etc.?
> Hmm, maybe just things that just display information (rather than
> interact)?  (And then maybe I could use xcompmgr or something to make
> them translucent?)

clocks, status bars and so on, go in the per-screen `gap', an unmanged
region of the screen, on any (or all) borders. xmonad will ignore 
clients in that area, that have override-redirect set on them.

See the status faq,

    http://xmonad.org/faq.html#status

and a recent blog by gimboland, on the topic,

    http://gimbo.org.uk/blog/2007/05/30/xmonad-does-status-bars-right/

> Another (much more trivial) decoration I'd like is the number of the
> workspace.  I guess that could use the per-workspace floating layer.
> (I imagine that as a translucent number in a corner, but I guess it
> could equally be opaque.  For preference it wouldn't take
> focus---actually, it would be nice to be able to have some clients not
> participate in focus---I don't want to type things into gkrellm, for
> example.)

We plan to dump the internal state of xmonad to stdout, so that you can
then post process it with a status bar client. dzen, for example, would
happily display the index of the current workspace this way. Expect a
patch for this soonish.

-- Don