[xmonad] darcs patch: GridSelect

[Don Stewart]

Wonderful. Applied.

Note the compiler warnings about defaulting. You might want to add an
annotation.

-- Don

clemens:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> Here is my little GridSelect toy. I don't think it's polished enough
> to go into contrib, but as I was asked about it when I posted a
> screenshot on IRC, I thought that I don't want to hold it back until
> I found time to polish it.
> 
> http://clemens.endorphin.org/gridselect.png
> 
> GridSelect brings up a 2D grid of windows in the center of the screen,
> and I can select a window with cursors keys. The window is delivered
> back to the caller of GridSelect, and for the moment the most useful
> thing it does for me is to raise and focus the selected window. The
> advantage over the presentation of Tabbed is that there is much more
> space for window titles, that are now not forced into a single row at
> the top of the screen, but can occupy multiple rows. Also navigating a
> 2D grid is also much faster than navigating a linear 1D structure.
> 
> GridSelect colorizes the cells according to the window class of
> displayed window. So, all windows with the same class get the same
> color, and after a while I start to remember which window class has
> which color. E.g., when I want my xchat window, I just have to search
> for light green, or if I want an emacs windows, I have to focus on
> dark violet.
> 
> There are a few ideas that I haven't found time to toy with. First I
> like the window arrangement to be more static. At the moment, the
> windows are sorted (by XMonad) according to its last use and
> GridSelect arranges them spiraling outwards in a diamond like
> pattern. Mentally, I can only keep track of the usage history to the
> depth of 2-3 for blindly selecting window. For everything else, I have
> to read titles. It would be more helpful to give fixed spots to
> windows. Of course, windows get deleted and new windows pop up all the
> time. Probably it would be good to defragment/sort by display time
> upon a key press.
> 
> Substring search on window titles is another idea. As GridSelect uses
> cursor keys for the moment, the rest of the keyboard could be used to
> enter the string used in searching. GridSelect should then gray out
> the windows that do not contain the search term.
> 
> Thanks to the community for XMonad,
> 
> Fruhwirth Clemens - http://clemens.endorphin.org 
> 


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