Alopex: a tiling tagging tabbed window manager with fur

HalosGhost · 2013-07-05 17:32:43

Just as a test, try the following in your .xinitrc:

exec alopex "while true;do date +'%F %r';sleep 1;done"

All the best,

-HG

Greduan · 2013-07-05 17:37:01

HalosGhost wrote:

Just as a test, try the following in your .xinitrc:
exec alopex "while true;do date +'%F %r';sleep 1;done"
All the best,
-HG

That works perfectly... Perhaps there's something wrong with the script? I do not see anything wrong with it though...

HalosGhost · 2013-07-05 17:43:50

Is the script executable?

All the best,

-HG

Trilby · 2013-07-05 18:03:11

Not being executable is my only suspicion as well. I just tried the same script and it worked fine - when executable, but not when not.

Last edited by Trilby (2013-07-05 18:04:58)

Greduan · 2013-07-05 18:12:24

/facedesk

Can't believe it was something that simple! I'm still not used to checking permissions when something doesn't work (switched to Linux around 1 month ago).

Thank you guys, it is now working as expected.

Trilby · 2013-07-05 18:43:24

Greduan wrote:

I'm back, hope no hard feelings are lying around.

I wanted to reply to this to say - None at all. I was a bit baffled by some of your early questions, but I suppose you were just diving in full force into something new - and without any other activity on these forums to compare it with I had no frame of reference - so for a bit I even wondered if we were being trolled.

I'm quite glad to be wrong on that. Do feel free to make any suggestions, user input is what keeps alopex alive.

Greduan · 2013-07-05 20:41:55

Trilby wrote:

Greduan wrote:
I'm back, hope no hard feelings are lying around.
I wanted to reply to this to say - None at all. I was a bit baffled by some of your early questions, but I suppose you were just diving in full force into something new - and without any other activity on these forums to compare it with I had no frame of reference - so for a bit I even wondered if we were being trolled.
I'm quite glad to be wrong on that.

I read my posts and they do seem like troll posts. lol

But yeah that wasn't my intention. The way I would put it is that I was trying to figure stuff out about it, and was just bombarding you guys with questions and suggestions that were mostly not fit for Alopex.

Do feel free to make any suggestions, user input is what keeps alopex alive.

Don't mind if I do.

I have, for other reasons, been considering a cairo-based fork of alopex. This would open up many cool possibilities, such as rotated side status bars, antialiased drawing of tabs, and real image icons that could be scaled to fit the status bar. This would then also allow for xft fonts. So this may be the way to go for a next project.

That would be nice. Although I don't really care for these features personally, it would be nice to have them.

-----

Here's a feature that would be nice. Currently if I'm in monocle mode (the mode I use 99% of the time) and I want to go to another application I gotta do Super+j/k to switch apps, one by one, until I get to the one I want. Now this is no problem if it's 2 or 3 apps, but what if it's 4, 5 or more? Currently I just have to switch apps one by one until I get to it, and hope that I don't overshoot it (several times).

So here's a quick solution I came up. Before the title of each app, add a "#. ", numbered from left to right. So if I have four apps open the first app would be "1. App title", app 2 would be "2. App title", so on and so forth. These numbers are just for reference. Then I can do Alt+1 or something along those lines and it just jumps the focus to that app (changing the screen to it as well). Of course if I'm not in monacle mode I could use this to quickly move around all the apps I have.

If we have 10 or more apps there could be a little problem. If we want to go to app #11, and we press Alt+1 it'll go to app one, so to avoid that how about we just add like a timer? Similar to how Vim works. If it knows there can be one more key in that keybinding then it waits a certain amount of time, if it gets the next key in that time it can just go ahead and do it with that new key (unless there's another possible key), if it doesn't get a key in that amount of time it can just go ahead and do it without the second key.

So something like this:
1. Alt+1
2. There's apps on the tens (1*) so I'll wait...
3. 1 second passed, going to app #1.
OR
1. Alt+1
2. There's apps on the tens (1*) so I'll wait...
3. Alt+3
4. No more possible outcomes, going to app #13.
OR
1. Alt+1
2. There's apps on the tens (1*) so I'll wait...
3. Alt+1
4. There's apps on the hundreds (11*) so I'll wait...
5. 1 second passed, going to app #11.
etc.

Of course if you have that many apps open you probably need to manage your environment a little bit better.

Was that clear enough? If not I can re-write to make it clearer.

Last edited by Greduan (2013-07-05 21:16:59)

Trilby · 2013-07-05 21:29:22

That makes sense, and sounds like a good idea. Rather than vim style chaining I may just allow a user-definable set of characters that will correspond to the order of windows - so as long as you don't have over 94 windows, it would work. This would be a bit like 'follow' mode in some browsers.

To get the behavior you describe for up to ten, then you'd just set the character array to "1234567890", but one could alternately set it to "asdfghjkl" as one example.

I'll look into this tomorrow.

Edit: you are using tags, though, right? You can have up to 16 tags, and if you are filling all tags with that many windows, you definitely have a lot open.

Another alternative that I'm thinking would be good would be to interact with something like interrobang (or dmenu for those who'd prefer it) to type in the first letters of a window title to go to that window. I'll do *this* first.

Last edited by Trilby (2013-07-05 21:36:34)

2ManyDogs · 2013-07-05 21:40:16

Trilby wrote:

Another alternative that I'm thinking would be good would be to interact with something like interrobang (or dmenu for those who'd prefer it) to type in the first letters of a window title to go to that window. I'll do *this* first.

I was going to suggest something like this -- musca uses dmenu this way -- "mod+w" shows a list of windows in a custom dmenu and allows you to select one.

Last edited by 2ManyDogs (2013-07-05 21:41:10)

Greduan · 2013-07-05 21:51:23

To get the behavior you describe for up to ten, then you'd just set the character array to "1234567890", but one could alternately set it to "asdfghjkl" as one example.

Oh that could work as well. So we can just configure this to numbers as well right? In case we do prefer the Vim style chaning.

Edit: you are using tags, though, right? You can have up to 16 tags, and if you are filling all tags with that many windows, you definitely have a lot open.

As of right now I haven't had the need for tags yet, since I only have 2 or 3 windows, so it doesn't make sense to me to have an extra keybinding to press. This is just for the future when I do need it.

Another alternative that I'm thinking would be good would be to interact with something like interrobang (or dmenu for those who'd prefer it) to type in the first letters of a window title to go to that window. I'll do *this* first.

Oh that could work quite well as well. Reminds me of Sublime Text's file switching features.

HalosGhost · 2013-07-05 21:55:15

I actually like the idea of numbering apps, but I think it might be done a little bit differently. First, I think it would be best if the apps on each workspace were numbered (rather than all apps together). This then requires/allows for dynamic numbering based on the apps available on the current workspace. To flesh that out a bit, that would mean if you have five clients open but only three "visible" on the current workspace, you'd only be able to follow-complete the three "visible" clients. Also, the numbering would be best (in this implementation) if they referred to the container order (i.e., far left tab / master will always be "1"—or "0" if you start with 0 as the index).

Second, I love the way Trilby pointed this out as being similar to vim-like follow bindings. I'd love for it to work as Mod+F, <type client name or number> (auto-jumps to client upon valid completion as vimperator does).

The interrobang scripting concept similar to dmenu's to work for clients would be awesome too I'd love both of them.

All the best,

-HG

Last edited by HalosGhost (2013-07-05 22:00:55)

Greduan · 2013-07-05 22:01:16

HalosGhost wrote:

I actually like the idea of numbering apps, but I think it might be done a little bit differently. First, I think it would be best if the apps on each workspace were numbered (rather than all apps together). This then requires/allows for dynamic numbering based on the apps available on the current workspace. To flesh that out a bit, that would mean if you have five clients open but only three "visible" on the current workspace, you'd only be able to follow-complete the three "visible" clients.

yeah I actually meant it that way, should have cleared that up. With workspace I imagine you mean tag right?

Last edited by Greduan (2013-07-05 22:01:31)

HalosGhost · 2013-07-05 22:04:03

Greduan wrote:

yeah I actually meant it that way, should have cleared that up. With workspace I imagine you mean tag right?

No, I mean workspace (or views). There is a difference, and though many people choose to use "tags as workspaces", I prefer the "tags as tags" paradigm. It's covered in the wiki page if memory serves.

All the best,

-HG

Last edited by HalosGhost (2013-07-05 22:04:49)

Greduan · 2013-07-05 22:09:07

HalosGhost wrote:

Greduan wrote:
yeah I actually meant it that way, should have cleared that up. With workspace I imagine you mean tag right?
No, I mean workspace (or views). There is a difference, and though many people choose to use "tags as workspaces", I prefer the "tags as tags" paradigm. It's covered in the wiki page if memory serves.
All the best,
-HG

Ah OK. I do know the difference, just making sure though.

Trilby · 2013-07-05 23:32:53

For a minute there I was confused. Alopex doesn't have "workspaces".

I did just add the window selection tool and pushed it to get. The default binding uses interrobang and requires the following two lines in interrobangr

!alopex     grep -F '%s' /tmp/alopex_windows | sed 's/ .*//'
TAB(alopex) awk '/%s%s/ { gsub(/^[0-9A-Fa-fx]* /,""); print; }' /tmp/alopex_windows

That bang line will be cleaned up once I check the awk manual on how to match fixed strings, but for now grep+sed works, even though it's ugly. This can, and often will fail if you allow for regex matching against titles.

This does, unfortunately have a minor conflict though which I just added to interrobang. The 'lastword' display mode for interrobang can really mangle window titles. For example, my terminal window may have the title "urxvt: ~", but in the interrobang list with the most recent change that just comes up as "~". I then also realized that this new behavior of interrobang will also interfere with a lot of potential script usage on interrobang. I'll have to make HG's iced cake (see interrobang thread) optional.

Also, I don't think I really understand this numbering idea anymore. It made sense to me when it would be global. But on a per-view basis it doesn't make much sense. If you have so many windows such that the 'normal' movements (Mod+j / Mod+k, etc) would not be enough, you should probably be putting some windows on other tags. If you had 10 windows, you could have 10 tags, then just switch between those with the already working Mod+#.

Though this does lead to another idea which I prefer (and since it's my wm, guess what I'll do ): right now say you had ten windows, each on their own tag, and all in view, there is no current binding for switching focus between tags without changing the view. *this* I will add. Then you could have several windows on several tags, all in the current view, and you could switch focus between them with a number-based binding.

Last edited by Trilby (2013-07-05 23:38:56)

Greduan · 2013-07-06 01:53:39

Trilby wrote:

For a minute there I was confused. Alopex doesn't have "workspaces".
I did just add the window selection tool and pushed it to get. The default binding uses interrobang and requires the following two lines in interrobangr
!alopex     grep -F '%s' /tmp/alopex_windows | sed 's/ .*//'
TAB(alopex) awk '/%s%s/ { gsub(/^[0-9A-Fa-fx]* /,""); print; }' /tmp/alopex_windows
That bang line will be cleaned up once I check the awk manual on how to match fixed strings, but for now grep+sed works, even though it's ugly. This can, and often will fail if you allow for regex matching against titles.

おつかれさまでした m(_ _)m
=
Thanks for your hard work *grateful bow*

From what I could figure in the Alopex code, what you did was basically make a temporary folder/file that contains the titles of the applications right? And then Interrobang looks at these entries and makes Alopex switch the focus. Right?

Trilby wrote:

Also, I don't think I really understand this numbering idea anymore. It made sense to me when it would be global. But on a per-view basis it doesn't make much sense. If you have so many windows such that the 'normal' movements (Mod+j / Mod+k, etc) would not be enough, you should probably be putting some windows on other tags. If you had 10 windows, you could have 10 tags, then just switch between those with the already working Mod+#.

A fair point. How about the case when we do use tags for sorting purposes? (Hypothetically) I have a "term" tag, a "web" tag and a "dev" tag. Let's say in the "term" tag I have 4 terminals, all with different processes, for the sake of argument I'm not using tmux. In the "web" tag I have my browser, qBittorrent, FileZilla and some other web related applications. And in the "dev" tag I have Sublime Text, and some other code/development related applications.

So this breaks the 1 app per tag scenario. If I need to go to the "term" tag to run a couple of commands easy enough I do Mod1+1 and I'm on that tag. But then what if inside that I need to move around the windows? I can use the mouse and go to terminal #3 OR do Alt+3 and go to the terminal I want (assuming that I know the number of that terminal). This process, of course, is repeated through my other two tags, in which it would be just as useful.

So I just painted the scenario where this would be useful. Is it a little more real why this would be useful?

Trilby wrote:

Though this does lead to another idea which I prefer (and since it's my wm, guess what I'll do ): right now say you had ten windows, each on their own tag, and all in view, there is no current binding for switching focus between tags without changing the view. *this* I will add. Then you could have several windows on several tags, all in the current view, and you could switch focus between them with a number-based binding.

What do you mean with "several windows on several tags, all in the current view"? I thought you could only have one tag displayed in one screen. Was I mistaken?

Edit: P.S.: I love anime/manga, so thought I would use the Japanese way of saying thanks for your hard work, which isn't the correct translation BTW, doesn't have an exact English equivalent. It's just a way to show gratitude for whatever the person did throught the day.

Last edited by Greduan (2013-07-06 01:57:31)

Trilby · 2013-07-06 11:01:23

Greduan wrote:

From what I could figure in the Alopex code, what you did was basically make a temporary folder/file that contains the titles of the applications right? And then Interrobang looks at these entries and makes Alopex switch the focus. Right?

Yes. I suppose I should describe it a bit better for anyone who wants to use something other than interrobang (eg dmenu). The keybinding for window list takes a program name as a parameter. Windowlist constucts a list with one line per client as "<number> <title>" and saves that list in /tmp/windowlist. The program passed in the parameter is run, and it should read from that list and return the number associated with the selected client.

The current implementation with interrobang will just give the first client that matches a title - if two clients have the same title.

Greduan wrote:

What do you mean with "several windows on several tags, all in the current view"? I thought you could only have one tag displayed in one screen. Was I mistaken?

Nope, that would be how workspaces work. Each client window can be assigned to many tags, or none at all; each view can have several tags, or non at all. The default keybindings are a bit of a hybrid setup to allow for using tags properly but to be not to foreign for users who prefer the workspace mechanism:
Super+# clears all other tags from view and assigns # to the current view.
Super+Alt+# toggles any tag in or out of the current view
Super+Ctrl+# clears all tags from the focused window and assigned # to it.
Super+Shift+# toggles any tag assignment on or off for the focused window.
Alt+Tab toggles between views.

Super+Alt+# and Super+Ctrl+# provide the more 'familiar' workspace feel, while Super+Alt+# and Super+Shift+# allow for 'proper' use of tagging. See here for more detail - I just wish they didn't refer to views as synonymous with workspaces, that just adds to the confusion.

Greduan · 2013-07-06 17:57:39

Trilby wrote:

Nope, that would be how workspaces work. Each client window can be assigned to many tags, or none at all; each view can have several tags, or non at all. The default keybindings are a bit of a hybrid setup to allow for using tags properly but to be not to foreign for users who prefer the workspace mechanism:
Super+# clears all other tags from view and assigns # to the current view.
Super+Alt+# toggles any tag in or out of the current view
Super+Ctrl+# clears all tags from the focused window and assigned # to it.
Super+Shift+# toggles any tag assignment on or off for the focused window.
Alt+Tab toggles between views.
Super+Alt+# and Super+Ctrl+# provide the more 'familiar' workspace feel, while Super+Alt+# and Super+Shift+# allow for 'proper' use of tagging. See here for more detail - I just wish they didn't refer to views as synonymous with workspaces, that just adds to the confusion.

Ah. I'll give that a read. In any case I don't usually use workspaces. I like having all my stuff in one screen available at all times.

HalosGhost · 2013-07-06 18:19:57

Okay, I just compiled alopex again, and now alopex will not accept or recognize any keybindings… It runs, and throws no errors, but I am incapable of doing anything.

Thoughts?

All the best,

-HG

Trilby · 2013-07-06 18:29:53

I did recently realize I have a very strict option in the makefile, so if you don't have a keybinding for every bindable function, the build may fail - but that sounds very different from what you are experiencing.

I just rebuilt via aur and it worked fine.

Can you go to the source directory, copy your config over if its not already there, then try to build `make` and see if there are errors.

HalosGhost · 2013-07-06 19:49:21

I just tried, and it built fine with no errors. I have a sneaking suspicion that the problem lies elsewhere, but I'm having so much trouble troubles shooting it.

[Edit]: I thought it might have been a problem in my interrobang config; but I just ruled that out as being the problem… I'm pretty stuck here…

All the best,

-HG

Last edited by HalosGhost (2013-07-06 20:07:27)

Trilby · 2013-07-06 20:06:36

If it were me, I'd put something like a terminal to launch from my xinitrc before alopex, then see if you can type in the terminal.

HalosGhost · 2013-07-06 20:19:03

I'm actually running alopex through systemd --user (that is, without a .xinitrc); so I don't have a good way of trying that. But, even the statusbar output my program generates is correct (and continues updating correctly). It just seems like alopex is no longer aware of any of my keybinds… only recognizes my keybind for the windowlist. All other keybinds seem dead….

[Edit]: My keybinding for the windowlist does work; but it is the only one that does. No other keybind appears to be recognized or acted upon. I've also tried removing the binding for the windowlist in case it was causing the problem, but no joy.

All the best,

-HG

Last edited by HalosGhost (2013-07-06 21:18:26)

Trilby · 2013-07-07 00:26:21

Have you tried the default config?

bgc1954 · 2013-07-07 03:08:47

Wow, only gone a few days and a debate and changes. I just tried the new config.h and when I start alopex with xdm it just kicks me back to xdm. I'll keep trying but not sure where the problem is. It's nice to have new features but as I only use monocle with a couple windows open, all the extras don't do squat for me. Thank goodness I keep a backup of my last package that built well for me.

BTW, my statusbar problems have disappeared so it appears that alopex wasn't the problem. Must have been something else updating that fixed the problem.

Arch Linux

#551 2013-07-05 17:32:43

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

#552 2013-07-05 17:37:01

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

#553 2013-07-05 17:43:50

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

#554 2013-07-05 18:03:11

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

#555 2013-07-05 18:12:24

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

#556 2013-07-05 18:43:24

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

#557 2013-07-05 20:41:55

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

#558 2013-07-05 21:29:22

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

#559 2013-07-05 21:40:16

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

#560 2013-07-05 21:51:23

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

#561 2013-07-05 21:55:15

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

#562 2013-07-05 22:01:16

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

#563 2013-07-05 22:04:03

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

#564 2013-07-05 22:09:07

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

#565 2013-07-05 23:32:53

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

#566 2013-07-06 01:53:39

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

#567 2013-07-06 11:01:23

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

#568 2013-07-06 17:57:39

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

#569 2013-07-06 18:19:57

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

#570 2013-07-06 18:29:53

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

#571 2013-07-06 19:49:21

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

#572 2013-07-06 20:06:36

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

#573 2013-07-06 20:19:03

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

#574 2013-07-07 00:26:21

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

#575 2013-07-07 03:08:47

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

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