[xmonad] Re: Proposal: Advanced Scratchpad-Features

[David Roundy]

On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 10:28:13PM -0500, Braden Shepherdson wrote:
> The second part is more difficult. Both byorgey and I seem to recall a 
> contrib module that did this appear-on-all-workspaces. One ugly solution 
> is to unmanage it and have it exist as a form of status bar.

I haven't looked at the scratchpad code at all, but an obvious solution
would seem (to me) to just be to use CopyWindow and put it in all the
workspaces.

But I can't help but wonder: wouldn't a scratch workspace be better than a
scratch window?  It ought to be pretty easy to make the
workspace-navigation functions ignore a "scratch" workspace (and isn't
strictly necessary, either), and then you could stick whatever you want in
there.

I can think of a number of possibilities to implement a scratch workspace,
either as a special layout or a special screen (that sometimes disappears,
or moves itself to inside another screen).  In fact, a special screen seems
like an extremely elegant (and easy!) approach.  You just have a function
to show/hide this screen.  This also opens up the approach of making the
scratchpad not overlap with other windows: the existing screen could
optionally be shrunk to make room.
-- 
David Roundy
Department of Physics
Oregon State University