

Re: [wmx] xnodecor pointlessness

Chris Cannam - Thu Dec 19 12:13:13 2002

Alexandros Diamantidis wrote:
> * "Stephen R. Saucier" <ssauci1@umbc.edu> [2002-12-19 02:33]:
>>Do most of you use the multiple desktops? 
> I use the multiple desktops all the time

The three features wmx has that I miss when I use wm2 are, in
order of importance:

  1. Keyboard controls.

  2. Desktops (or rather, "channels").  The great thing about
     wmx's channel implementation is that you can have a variable
     number of them.  Need to test out a bit of software quite
     separately from the rest of your work?  Just stick it in the
     blank channel at the end, and a new channel will be created
     and automatically be removed again when you've finished.
     I rarely have fewer than three (non-empty) channels on the
     go, or more than five, but being able to vary them is useful.

  3. Menu feedback (the CONFIG_MAD_FEEDBACK option).  I tend to
     keep quite a few things like terminals and editors hanging
     around hidden, and it's quite handy to be able to see which
     is which in a spatial sense without having to restore them.
     You can also use this with terminal windows that are only
     there to show logging out ("tail -f" on some log file):
     keep them hidden, and when you want to check that things
     are still fine, just hover over the terminal's entry on the
     menu, wait for it to pop up, read the output, and then mouse
     away and bing! it disappears again.

>>and then you could make use of Xft to draw the text nicely.
> Maybe it would be worthwhile to use Pango to draw the text,
> to support complex scripts such as arabic and indic.

Well, part of the point is that wm2/wmx are supposed to be small
and not to depend on too many libraries.  I would like to have
antialiased text and free i18n support, and it's certainly true
that xvertext is an old hack rather than a good way of doing this
stuff in general, but it's all that was available back then and
it does keep the program size and number of dependencies down.
I don't think I'd want to depend on having Xft or Pango around
to be able to run wm2 or wmx, although I'd probably accept a
patch that added support if it kept the current arrangement and
codesize when disabled, and if it fell back cleanly if run on a
system with the correct libraries but without the correct X