[xmonad] "minimize" + "boringAuto" in Full-layout: focusUp and focusDown don't change focus

[Jan Vornberger]

On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 05:53:43PM -0500, Adam Vogt wrote:
> * On Saturday, December 19 2009, Ralph Hofmann wrote:
> >If all windows except one are minimized, "my" boringAuto would behave
> >exactly like the built in: it would skip the minimized windows and show
> >only the one not minimized.
> 
> Oh, now I understand that you want a distinction made between
> non-visible windows, and windows that are minimized.

As the author of X.L.Minimize, I would consider the behaviour that Ralph
pointed out to be a bug, so thx Ralph for bringing it up! To be clear,
boringAuto works as it should, but I need to find another approach then
to make it work better with the Full-layout.

When I looked into focus skipping for minimized windows, I was lazy and
just used boringAuto, because I figured every minimized window has no
rectangle associated with it, so would be marked by boringAuto. I didn't
think of cases, where a window has no rectangle associated with it, but
isn't minimized - as in the case of the Full-layout.

So I think the proper way to fix this is to have X.L.Minimize explicitly
export the list of currently minimized windows as 'boring' and stop
using boringAuto. That should yield the behaviour that Ralph is looking
for, namely have the focus only skip windows that are actually in the
state 'minimized' independent of whether they are currently visible or
not. I think that is what one would expect.

I will write up a patch some time soon for that. In the meantime you -
Ralph - will need to use one of the workarounds Adam mentioned. To use
XMonad.Layout.Simplest instead of Full seems like a good workaround, if
it indeed stops boringAuto from marking non-visible but also non-minimized
windows as boring. Unfortunately, in my tests I still can't change the
focus to them (?).

Regards,

Jan