[xmonad] Announcement: Bluetile

[Toby Cubitt]

On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 09:25:47PM +0200, Jan Vornberger wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 02:08:22AM -0400, Kyle Murphy wrote:
> > If you don't think it's straying too far off topic, or too time consuming
> > would it be possible to get a brief summary of the kinds of changes you
> > needed to make to xmonad? I'm particularly intrigued by those title bars you
> > have on the windows as it would be nice to get something like that on
> > floating windows or in certain kinds of layouts with plain vanilla xmonad
> > (and yes, I'm aware of the tab bars).
>
> Unfortunately the decoration is the one part, which right now isn't very
> modular at all. So if you would use Bluetile's decoration, it would
> probably pull in a bunch of stuff that you may or may not actually want.
>
> But what kind of decoration are you looking for? Do you also want those
> 'buttons' for minimizing, maximizing and closing? Because then,
> obviously, you would also need the layout modifiers that minimize and
> maximize.
>
> Or do you only want the decoration without those buttons? Then it's not
> much different from what is currently in XMC.Layout.Decoration (expect
> for a bunch of improvements to make decoration work better in a
> dual-head setup. I don't know if you have such a setup?)
>
> One more thing: This won't work on floating windows. The decoration is a
> layout modifier, so will only affect windows that are managed by a
> layout (which floating windows aren't).
> Those 'floating windows' you see on Bluetile's screenshots is the effect
> of an extra floating/stacking layout. Bluetile discourages the use of
> the floating layer and instead provides this extra layout. It's a little
> bit like XMC.Layout.SimpleFloat but much improved - again especially for
> dual-head setups - but requires a modification to xmonad core (the
> PositionStore).

What's particularly beautiful to me about Bluetile is the way windows can
be moved and resized using only the mouse, both when tiled and when
"floating". Xmonad seems to be designed to cater for keyboard-only use,
and the support for that is fantastic. But I use Xmonad on a tablet PC,
so mouse-only use is also important to me. Currently Xmonad isn't so
great for the latter.

I'd love to see these parts of Bluetile make it into Xmonad or
Xmonad-contrib. How easy would that be to do? I guess for starters it
would need your extra floating/stacking layout...

Best,

Toby

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

email: toby at dr-qubit.org
web: www.dr-qubit.org