[Xmonad] ideas for new layouts and layout modifiers

[David Roundy]

On Thu, Sep 27, 2007 at 04:09:38PM -0300, Isaac Dupree wrote:
> David Roundy wrote:
> >1. WindowNavigator
> >
> >  A layout modifier that keeps track of the rectangles of visible windows
> >  and a "cursor" point, to allow keybindings for "shift focus
> >  up/down/left/right" in a real geometric manner.  It's independent of the
> >  tiling algorithm used.  A key point is that moving left followed by right
> >  will always return focus to its original position (except sometimes if
> >  the layout of the screen changes when you move focus left).
> 
> Please display somehow (a *faint* red border?) the trail of windows that 
> you'll go to with left or right.  It annoys me in word processors that I 
> can't see where up or down is going to take me to.  Modal badness... 
> (Although with xmonad, I don't put more than a few windows on a 
> workspace and usually use full-screen, so it doesn't actually make much 
> of a difference to me)

I'm afraid that might be complicated, and my experience with ion3
navigation was that it was pretty intuitive.  But what you describe
shouldn't be hard, it's just that it'd mean that we'd have to keep track of
which windows we outlined so as to be able to turn them back.  My gut
feeling is that the visual clutter will be more harm than gain, but it
would be trivial to set the "navigation color" to black.
-- 
David Roundy
Department of Physics
Oregon State University