Alopex: a tiling tagging tabbed window manager with fur

bgc1954 · 2013-05-01 03:59:54

@HG - agreed--until I've settled on something that I can suggest to Trilby, I'll continue to play around as I've done. The theme.h doesn't seem be working on my end as is intended so I'll just play around as is for now.

bgc1954 · 2013-05-01 18:54:31

This is the result of messing around this AM. Could likely use more tweeking, but hey, it's a start.

 [Background]    = "#333300",
        [Default]               = "#00B010",
        [Occupied]              = "#33FF00",
        [Selected]              = "#009933",
        [Urgent]                = "#CCFF33",
        [Title]                 = "#00FF66",
        [TabFocused]    = "#66FF00",
        [TabFocusedBG]  = "#333200",
        [TabTop]                = "#66FF00",
        [TabTopBG]              = "#333100",
        [TabDefault]    = "#339900",
        [TabDefaultBG]  = "#333010",
        [TagLine]               = "#D0C010",

And the background was just messing with gimp. Kind of looks like a christmas tree with ears. I saw an image I liked and hand drew it using a mouse--or at least thats my excuse.

Last edited by bgc1954 (2013-05-01 18:57:27)

HalosGhost · 2013-05-01 18:58:01

bgc1954 wrote:

This is the result of messing around this AM. Could likely use more tweeking, but hey, it's a start.

Nice! I actually think it would be an awesome idea for you to throw that over in the screenshot/artwork thread. User-themes definitely count as artwork!

All the best,

-HG

Trilby · 2013-05-02 01:08:38

That's very green. I love the logo on the wallpaper - did you make the logo, or did you find it somewhere?

bgc1954 · 2013-05-02 03:32:01

I found something similair that I liked but it had watermarks across it and so I drew my own in gimp with my mouse and it's much more simplified. Original was at shutterstock.com, I think, but now I can't find it. Mine is on ompldr.org if you search alopex, it should be there. And, you're right, it's very, very green so I'm not sure that I'd actually use it permanently.

edit: I'm still finding that building alopex with the wintercoat theme in config.h still gives me the summercoat but that actually goes better with my sailboat sunset background so I'm finding the theme.h not working quite right at this end. My fault again as Summercoat was specified in my PKGBUILD when I was trying themes at one point.

Trilby - I just setup a git account--interesting process--and the raw logo is in my alopex folder--just click on configs in my sig.

Last edited by bgc1954 (2013-05-02 16:50:11)

Trilby · 2013-05-03 15:59:14

Thanks for the logo - but I'm a bit concerned about including it in anything official if you grabbed it from some site and removed a watermark to edit it.

For personal use, such tinkering seems fine to me, but I wouldn't distribute anything that may be under someone else's copyright. The website banner, for example, was from a US Fish & Wildlife photo and thus is in the public domain.

On another note, I think I figured out why theming wasn't working as intended. The code on git was halfway between two different ways of selecting the theme. I've removed all theme related code from config.h and users should remove it from theirs. You will now only select the theme through an environment variable passed to `make`. The good news is you don't have to modify the PKGBUILD to do this. One can to the following to create different themes:

MOLT=SummerCoat makepkg -i
MOLT=DayLight makepkg -i

The DayLight theme is new. I've thought about it previously, and just got motivated to make it due to the nice weather we're having here: my normal dark themes are pretty miserably hard to see when sitting out at a picnic table in the sun.

I've also tossed in another nice bit with this: Each theme defines a preprocessor macro THEME_NAME which can be used in other parts of the config. In the default I've set it to be passed as a classname to the terminal. I've added definitions to my ~/.Xdefaults for those classnames, so if I run alopex with the WinterCoat theme, I have my normal matching urxvt theme; but if I run alopex with DayLight, when I launch a terminal it call "utxvt -name DayLight" and I get my light background terminal. This is quite handy for working outside on a nice day.

There's also a fix for a minor but nagging issue with the tab backgrounds that were not properly aligned. There was - previously - a 1px gap between the end of the background "fill" and the outline. This is now fixed.

Last edited by Trilby (2013-05-03 16:01:15)

bgc1954 · 2013-05-03 16:54:10

Trilby wrote:

Thanks for the logo - but I'm a bit concerned about including it in anything official if you grabbed it from some site and removed a watermark to edit it.

Like I said before, I didn't just remove a watermark, I totally drew it from scratch by hand with my mouse in gimp using the other as an idea, but the end result is actually quite different. I found it again so I'll post it here and you decide, although when I first drew this it was just for fun and not really trying to create your actual logo.

My raw drawing is in my alopex folder on github. But hey, thanks for even considering it.

Trilby · 2013-05-03 17:06:05

Sorry, I had misunderstood. Using something else as inspiration is perfectly safe.

bgc1954 · 2013-05-03 18:12:41

I just put up a change in my alopex.png. It looked a little raw and not uniform so I cut and pasted half the face and then inverted so the two sides are uniform. I also changed the nose as I wasn't happy with the original. I'm just working on some wallpaper--one not so green--that I'll post in the alopex art/screenshots thread.

HalosGhost · 2013-05-03 23:14:35

Trilby wrote:

MOLT=SummerCoat makepkg -i
MOLT=DayLight makepkg -i

This is so handy. And now I have my theme.h file all setup and pretty

All the best,

-HG

OK100 · 2013-05-12 20:53:03

Hey Trilby,

I'm currently testing Alopex and so far it looks really promising However, I found a few small issues:

There seems to be an issue with fullscreen windows. For example, mplayer can't exit fullscreen mode (with f key), and sxiv don't even go fullscreen.
I want mplayer to always run in floating mode, so I added this line to config.h:
```
{ NULL,  "mplayer2",  0,  FLAG_FLOATING },
```
This works, but mplayer is always opened on the first tag, even if I set tags to 0.
Is there any way to restart alopex without restarting X?
Is it possible to run custom commands on various mouse events (e.g click on desktop window, statusbar)? This would be useful for a menu, calendar etc. Also, it would be great if tabs and tags would be clickable.

Thanks again, this is really awesome.

Last edited by OK100 (2013-05-12 21:17:30)

Trilby · 2013-05-12 21:33:25

I just played with mplayer - this seems to be an mplayer issue. You can use the alopex keybinding (MOD4+f by default) to toggle fullscreen, that works perfectly for me. Mplayer's "f" key doesn't change any fullscreen hints - nothing it it's xprop output changes. (edit: I just pushed a workaround that will cope with mplayer's built in fullscreen behavior.)

The zero tag issue was a bug from a recent revision of the apply_rules function. I just pushed a fix that I'll test momentarily (edit: tested, works here.)

As for the button events, they are very simple: you can bind any mouse button or any mod+button to any function, but there is no mechanism for differentiating clicks on tags, tabs, or anything else - alopex is not a mouse-friendly WM.

EDIT: oh, and yes you can quit alopex without closing X11, Mod+Shift+Q by default, but if you run alopex in a loop, it will not manage any windows that were already open when it started.

Last edited by Trilby (2013-05-12 22:28:12)

OK100 · 2013-05-13 12:44:10

Thanks for the quick fixes Trilby.
EDIT: Just noticed that an app gets focus even if it's opened on inactive tag (defined in rules). Is this intended behaviour?

Last edited by OK100 (2013-05-13 12:47:58)

Trilby · 2013-05-13 13:06:40

Nope, I just noticed that too. The rules are still pretty new and developing. Expect a fix for this within a day.

EDIT: This should be fixed, please test to confirm.

EDIT: also sxiv will have to go in the "wont fix" category. Alopex is not yet fully ICCM compliant, but I will happily add whatever is needed for that. EWMH is a horrible standard, though, and I will never implement all the ridiculous things needed for that. Most client programs are ICCM compliant, some add EWMH compliance in addition to that - any of these will work as the ICCM mechanisms are there. Sxiv, however, seems to have implemented only EWMH mechanisms for fullscreening which is indicated in the manual page. This strikes me as quite odd given it's target market. Feh fullscreen toggling, on the other hand, works perfectly in alopex.

Last edited by Trilby (2013-05-13 16:10:13)

OK100 · 2013-05-13 19:00:47

Trilby wrote:

Nope, I just noticed that too. The rules are still pretty new and developing. Expect a fix for this within a day.
EDIT: This should be fixed, please test to confirm.

Now it works fine for me.

Trilby wrote:

also sxiv will have to go in the "wont fix" category. Alopex is not yet fully ICCM compliant, but I will happily add whatever is needed for that. EWMH is a horrible standard, though, and I will never implement all the ridiculous things needed for that. Most client programs are ICCM compliant, some add EWMH compliance in addition to that - any of these will work as the ICCM mechanisms are there. Sxiv, however, seems to have implemented only EWMH mechanisms for fullscreening which is indicated in the manual page. This strikes me as quite odd given it's target market. Feh fullscreen toggling, on the other hand, works perfectly in alopex.

Oh, I see. It's not a big deal anyway since alopex's fullscreen keybinding can be used instead.

EDIT: Found another issue Rules by window name seems to have no effect, e.g:

{ "LibreOffice",  NULL,  1 << 0,  0 },

Last edited by OK100 (2013-05-13 19:04:22)

Trilby · 2013-05-13 19:22:35

It works fine here - are you sure that "LibreOffice" is the actual window class name? No libreoffice windows here have that as a class name. I get the following from two different LO windows:

xprop | grep -i class
WM_CLASS(STRING) = "VCLSalFrame.DocumentWindow", "libreoffice-startcenter"
...
WM_CLASS(STRING) = "VCLSalFrame.DocumentWindow", "libreoffice-writer"

Last edited by Trilby (2013-05-13 19:24:37)

OK100 · 2013-05-13 19:37:42

I'm not talking about window class - that indeed works fine - but about window name. It's not just libreoffice but all rules that have defined "name" seems to not work. Here's another example for urxvtc -title music:

{ "music",  NULL,  1 << 2,  0 },

xprop says:

» xprop | grep -i name
WM_LOCALE_NAME(STRING) = "en_US.UTF-8"
_NET_WM_ICON_NAME(UTF8_STRING) = "music"
WM_ICON_NAME(STRING) = "music"
_NET_WM_NAME(UTF8_STRING) = "music"
WM_NAME(STRING) = "music"

Trilby · 2013-05-13 19:55:23

The rules only match the WM_CLASS strings. WM_NAME is a much more dynamic property often changing many times while a program is running and is used for the title in the tab name. If WM_NAME were used for rules, rules would be "reapplied" many times while a program was running and could potentially jump between tags, or in and out of floating/fullscreen mode.

ref: http://www.tronche.com/gui/x/xlib/ICC/c … class.html

Last edited by Trilby (2013-05-13 19:56:47)

OK100 · 2013-05-14 14:52:29

Oh, so is there any way to assign different urxvt windows to different tags?

Trilby · 2013-05-14 15:02:23

Sure, use the urxvt -name option which sets the resource name of the window. I doubt you'd want the WM_NAME string used for this as programs change the WM_NAME as they run.

For example, if you had an alopex rule to move any window named "mutt" to tag 3, then you coud open launch `urxvt -name "mutt" -e mutt` and it would open your email on tag three as desired. But if, instead, alopex used WM_NAME, then if you opened a terminal in tag one, and typed "mutt" it could move the terminal you are currently in to tag three.

I don't know of any window manager rules that use WM_NAME, it wouldn't make any sense. WMs that have such rules use resource name and resource class from WM_CLASS.

Also, the WM_NAME is often not even properly set until after the window is mapped, so rules based on this would either fail all together, or have the window flash up on the current tag before being moved the the proper tag after the WM_NAME string was set.

Last edited by Trilby (2013-05-14 15:08:10)

HalosGhost · 2013-05-16 12:51:12

I think this misunderstanding may have been partially reinfoced by an inaccuracy of the man pages. Sorry! I'llbe editing them shortly. I've edited them and pushed the changes upstream.

All the best,

-HG

Last edited by HalosGhost (2013-05-16 23:17:42)

Trilby · 2013-05-18 01:38:39

I just noticed this in the wiki as well and revised. Sorry for the confusion 0k100.

SolarBoyMatt · 2013-05-18 02:48:53

I've decided to give Alopex a try, and it works wonderfully so far!

I wanted to reuse my conky script from dwm for the statusbar, and while passing conky as an argument to Alopex works fine, I also wanted to colorize the output. The method I used for dwm doesn't work obviously, and neither does using conky's ${color} tag, probably due to how the console output mode works. Is this even possible to do with conky and Alopex? Or should I start looking into writing a bash script instead? There was talk much earlier on in the thread about having to use dzen2 for this, but I'd rather not do it that way.

Trilby · 2013-05-18 03:14:28

I've never really used conky, but other users here do. The output is just plain text, and the input to alopex is just plain text.

You just have to format the color codes according the the status bar section of the manual page {#RRGGBB}

SolarBoyMatt · 2013-05-18 19:26:26

Thanks, that worked. I did see that part when I was reading the wiki page, but I wasn't sure if it could be applied to conky or not.

Arch Linux

#476 2013-05-01 03:59:54

Re: Alopex: a tiling tagging tabbed window manager with fur

#477 2013-05-01 18:54:31

Re: Alopex: a tiling tagging tabbed window manager with fur

#478 2013-05-01 18:58:01

Re: Alopex: a tiling tagging tabbed window manager with fur

#479 2013-05-02 01:08:38

Re: Alopex: a tiling tagging tabbed window manager with fur

#480 2013-05-02 03:32:01

Re: Alopex: a tiling tagging tabbed window manager with fur

#481 2013-05-03 15:59:14

Re: Alopex: a tiling tagging tabbed window manager with fur

#482 2013-05-03 16:54:10

Re: Alopex: a tiling tagging tabbed window manager with fur

#483 2013-05-03 17:06:05

Re: Alopex: a tiling tagging tabbed window manager with fur

#484 2013-05-03 18:12:41

Re: Alopex: a tiling tagging tabbed window manager with fur

#485 2013-05-03 23:14:35

Re: Alopex: a tiling tagging tabbed window manager with fur

#486 2013-05-12 20:53:03

Re: Alopex: a tiling tagging tabbed window manager with fur

#487 2013-05-12 21:33:25

Re: Alopex: a tiling tagging tabbed window manager with fur

#488 2013-05-13 12:44:10

Re: Alopex: a tiling tagging tabbed window manager with fur

#489 2013-05-13 13:06:40

Re: Alopex: a tiling tagging tabbed window manager with fur

#490 2013-05-13 19:00:47

Re: Alopex: a tiling tagging tabbed window manager with fur

#491 2013-05-13 19:22:35

Re: Alopex: a tiling tagging tabbed window manager with fur

#492 2013-05-13 19:37:42

Re: Alopex: a tiling tagging tabbed window manager with fur

#493 2013-05-13 19:55:23

Re: Alopex: a tiling tagging tabbed window manager with fur

#494 2013-05-14 14:52:29

Re: Alopex: a tiling tagging tabbed window manager with fur

#495 2013-05-14 15:02:23

Re: Alopex: a tiling tagging tabbed window manager with fur

#496 2013-05-16 12:51:12

Re: Alopex: a tiling tagging tabbed window manager with fur

#497 2013-05-18 01:38:39

Re: Alopex: a tiling tagging tabbed window manager with fur

#498 2013-05-18 02:48:53

Re: Alopex: a tiling tagging tabbed window manager with fur

#499 2013-05-18 03:14:28

Re: Alopex: a tiling tagging tabbed window manager with fur

#500 2013-05-18 19:26:26

Re: Alopex: a tiling tagging tabbed window manager with fur

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