[xmonad] Cellwriter and XMonad

[Toby Cubitt]

Hi Sergey,

On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 07:41:54PM -0600, Sergey Manucharian wrote:
> I have just installed Cellwriter in my Arch Linux box to see how it
> actually works.
>
> > I can't seem to get Cellwriter (a handwriting recognition input
> > panel) to work with XMonad, whereas it works fine under other window
> > managers.
> It's not exactly true. It does not work under TWM too. But it works
> with XFCE. Haven't check others though.

Yes, I should have been clearer: by "it works under other window
managers", I meant "under some other window managers" rather than "under
all". As far as I remember, I've previously had Cellwriter working under
Enlightenment and Compiz. (Presumably it works under Gnome and KDE, since
Cellwriter available in a number of distributions, but I haven't
personally tested that.)

> > When I enter letters in Cellwriter and hit the "Enter"
> > button, the input doesn't seem to go anywhere.
> As I could figure out, the output is supposed to go to the ACTVIVE
> (focused) window. When you use it with Xmonad, the Cellwriter's window
> is focused all the time! In e.g. XFCE the Cellwriter's window is never
> becomes active - focus is at the previous one, and you can move the
> mouse around to make different windows to become active and accept the
> Cellwriter's output.

Yes, that sounds about right. At the back of my mind, I've always vaguely
wondered how Cellwriter manages to accept input without grabbing the
focus, but not knowing much about low-level X windows programming I never
tried to figure it out.

> But I really do not know how to overcome such a behaviour. The same
> problem will arise with any virtual on-screen keyboard.

I wonder how it works in other window managers? Or rather, what does
Cellwriter do to avoid becoming the active window in window managers such
as XFCE or Enlightenment?

> > The only Cellwriter-related config I've put in my xmonad.hs is to
> > always float it
> By the way, for me it floats without any config...

You're right, it floats for me too without any config.

Toby
--
Dr T. S. Cubitt
Quantum Information Theory group
Department of Mathematics
University of Bristol
United Kingdom

email: tsc25 at cantab.net
web: www.dr-qubit.org