[xmonad] Announcement: Bluetile

[Jan Vornberger]

Hi!

On Sun, Sep 06, 2009 at 03:15:55PM +0200, Olivier Schwander wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Le 03 Sep 2009 20:02, Jan Vornberger a écrit:
> >     * Maximizing & minimizing windows in all layouts
> 
> It may be a dumb question, but is there a way to use the GNOME window
> decorator to draw windows border and titlebar ? I just had a look at the
> screenshot and I feel it may have a better look with such a decoration ?

I agree, it would be really nice to be able to use the GNOME/Metacity
window decorator. I don't know if there is an easy way to do this.

I did look into using the window decorator of Compiz. They seperated the
decoration part into an extra manager, that talks with the core
application. That way it's easy to write different decoration manager
and they can use stuff like the GTK toolkit, without having that
dependency in Compiz itself. So I figured, it might be possible to reuse
those decoration managers with Bluetile.

There isn't too much documentation, how exactly it works, but this is
what I gathered (mostly from these two posts:
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/compiz/2006-April/000009.html and
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/compiz/2007-April/001935.html):
Compiz creates input-only frame windows around all real windows and sets
a property on them. The decoration manager finds those frame windows by
the property and creates pixmaps that contain the decoration. Those are
then somehow communicated back to the window manager and can be drawn.
There are some libraries (libdecoration, libwnck) to help with some off
this stuff.

Unfortunately it was beyond my skills with X11 programming and
interfacing with C applications from Haskell to do this in the time I
had. There might be other problems as well, I'm not sure. It would be a
nice feature though, I agree.

> 
> >    * Designed to integrate with the GNOME desktop environment
> 
> By saying that, you are okay to depend on GNOME features, aren't you ?

I guess so - do you have anything particular in mind? I guess
'integrated' is a little too much to say here. I think it's still fairly
desktop environment agnostic, but I only tested it with GNOME, so that's
why I mention it. The only 'integration' is, that some Metacity keyboard
shortcuts are available and gnome-terminal is the default terminal (but
if that is not available, it falls back to xterm).

Regards!

Jan