goomwwm: Get out of my way, window manager!

dublindan · 2012-07-27 17:41:05

Just curious, based on the number of emails you've been getting, roughly how many goomwwm users do you think there are?

aerosuidae · 2012-07-27 20:05:59

Difficult to say. How to tell what percentage of users make contact and what percentage lurk? Just make shit up?

My guess for full time goomwwm users: more than 10, less than 50? Part time users waiting for it to stabilize, somewhere above that...

Are those normal numbers for a new project? No idea. Certainly there is more activity than there was for musca at the same point. Does that mean goomwwm is a better product? Or does it merely mean more people are more likely to try out a stacker than a tiler? Again, no idea...

Last edited by aerosuidae (2012-07-27 20:06:46)

hellomynameisphil · 2012-07-28 14:00:01

aerosuidae wrote:

Certainly there is more activity than there was for musca at the same point. Does that mean goomwwm is a better product? Or does it merely mean more people are more likely to try out a stacker than a tiler? Again, no idea...

I think it means that a lot of people are trying goomwwm based on the reputation of musca. Musca was pretty much my favourite window manager for a while. The only reason I no longer use it is because of a few deal-killing bugs and lack of development. Many other people who used it were also very devoted to it.

dublindan · 2012-07-30 00:10:03

hellomynameisphil wrote:

I think it means that a lot of people are trying goomwwm based on the reputation of musca. Musca was pretty much my favourite window manager for a while.

Seconded. If it weren't for goomwwm, I may still be using musca. Non of the bugs affected my day to day use and there were no glaring feature omissions (some nice to haves, sure, but nothing that would have made a terribly big impact on my day to day usage). I stopped using musca back in late February because I did a Ubuntu install because I needed something fast and didn't have time to set up drivers for Arch and I stuck with it for a while, but by the time I reinstalled Arch a few months later, after deciding I really didn't like Ubuntu and wanting to go back to Arch, I heard about goomwwm and wanted to give it a try. If not for goomwwm, I may have installed musca again instead. Or I may have tried one of the others, but the only reason for doing that would have been because musca has had no active development (that I know of) in a long time. No other reason.

Having said that, I feel that goomwwm is now at a stage where it is superior to musca, because it allows me to pretty much work like I did in musca, yet it also allows me to do things that weren't so easy or convenient in musca - overlapping windows that work better than muscas stacking mode and rulesets being the biggies.

In other news, the -restart "crash" still happens, though I have not yet figured out why or how to reliably reproduce it. Will let you know when I find out more.

And another feature request for post-1.0: it would be really cool if the window switcher position could be customised rather than always having it in the center of the screen. I'm thinking having a vertical and horizontal alignment. Vertical would have the following possible values: top, center, bottom. Horizontal would have the values of left, center or right. The default would be center,center.

Last edited by dublindan (2012-07-30 00:28:07)

aerosuidae · 2012-07-30 03:31:45

dublindan wrote:

...I may still be using musca. Non of the bugs affected my day to day use and there were no glaring feature omissions (some nice to haves, sure, but nothing that would have made a terribly big impact on my day to day usage).

Indeed, the musca show-stopper bugs didn't affect me personally either, and then sometime after 0.9.24 my work situation forced me away from FOSS development for a while. I know a couple brave souls took over at different times and patched musca, but frankly the source code was convoluted and undocumented. I think ultimately projects like i3 and herbstluftwm have done a far better job for those wanting a manual tiler.

One of the reasons for putting goomwwm on github is to keep it more accessible to others and better documented than musca was. If I get hit by a bus, it should be easy to fork and continue the project if someone wants to do so.

dublindan wrote:

In other news, the -restart "crash" still happens, though I have not yet figured out why or how to reliably reproduce it. Will let you know when I find out more.

Currently the wm/cli interaction is very simple using only a communication time out rather than a nice handshake. I've increased the time out slightly just in case that's causing your crash. Either way, it's an indication that v1.1 will need a better mechanism.

dublindan wrote:

And another feature request for post-1.0: it would be really cool if the window switcher position could be customised rather than always having it in the center of the screen.

Feature request noted.

bgc1954 · 2012-08-05 21:11:21

I've noticed that my old T21 Thinkpad acts strangely with goomwwm if my one-line conky runs as

own_window_type panel

My modkey+1 or modkey+2 key combos don't work but I can use modkey+x to bring up dmenu but nothing will start with dmenu. It seems like the hard drive is reacting to the command from dmenu but nothing shows up. The quit key combo still works too. As soon as I don't try to run conky as a panel, goomwwm keys work fine. This is definitely not any kind of dealbreaker but I'm curious as to why this might be happening. I'm running conky as a panel on both my netbook and desktop and nothing is affected on either.

I know the easy answer is "don't run conky as a panel with goomwwm on an old thinkpad".

Last edited by bgc1954 (2012-08-05 21:15:29)

aerosuidae · 2012-08-07 02:39:52

@bgc1954

The dmenu command that causes hdd activity yet nothing happens: can you run that successfully from an xterm? Or does it spit out an error?

Does conky on the Thinkpad have any different .conkyrc settings compared to the instances on your other machines? If so, does .conkyrc from your netbook work on the Thinkpad?

It's not something odd happening with the blue Fn keys on Thinkpads, is it? No, I don't know why this would affect conky, just throwing out ideas I'm testing random stuff with an R400 Thinkpad here, but so far both goomwwm and conky are behaving.

Last edited by aerosuidae (2012-08-07 02:40:21)

bgc1954 · 2012-08-07 15:46:05

@aerosuidae: I think I've got it sorted out but it isn't going to change the way I run conky on my T21 for now anyway. It all seems to be caused by alignment and gap settings in the .conkyrc. If I use

own_window_type panel
alignment tm
gap_x 0
gap_y 752

then my oneline conky appears at the bottom of my screen but goomwwm key commands to start any application don't work--or don't seem to.

If I use

own_window_type panel
alignment bm
gap_x 0
gap_y 0

then conky appears several lines above the bottom of the screen--wasting about a 1/4 of the screen space--and all key combos work.

What I'm probably going to keep using is

own_window_type normal
alignment tm
gap_x 0
gap_y 752

which keeps conky at the bottom of the screen and the keys work but browsers and such overlap conky as it's not running as a panel, but that's no big deal. I can duplicate this behavior on my netbook and desktop. If you use any gap settings to place conky on the bottom of the screen while running as a panel, goomwwm key commands to launch applications don't appear to work. Funny thing that.

And your first question I couldn't try as if I ran my conky with the gap settings and as a panel, I couldn't raise a terminal at all to even try to run dmenu. I guess conky doesn't like to have panels placed on the screen with x & y settings in goomwwm? I'll try the same thing in openbox or something else and see if things get weird.

Last edited by bgc1954 (2012-08-07 16:01:30)

bgc1954 · 2012-08-07 16:38:55

Well it seems that most other wm's I've tried ignore alignment settings when running conky as a panel. i3, openbox and monsterwm all place my one line conky at the top of the screen so I thought...hmmm...I wonder what goomwwm does in this instance if I leave conky at the top instead of the bottom of the screen. I use

own_window_type panel
alignment tm
gap_x 0
gap_y 0

and all is well. Conky is in the top middle of my screen and all the key commands work. I've gotten used to my conky on the bottom of the screen but I don't use the old thinkpad much so I can live with it at the top. I guess this doesn't have alot to do with the way goomwwm runs.

aerosuidae · 2012-08-08 05:40:55

@bgc1954, I think conky's gap_y affects _NET_WM_STRUT when in panel mode. You were effectively setting conky to request the entire screen space for struts, which goomwwm blindly tried to respect resulting in zero space for windows. As you found, alignment exists for a reason

That said, I think there is still a goomwwm bug here. We should detect crazy strut values and ignore them, and perhaps also show a warning in the log. Possibly this is what i3 and friends are doing. Thanks for pursuing this. I'll look into it.

Last edited by aerosuidae (2012-08-08 05:41:12)

sime · 2012-08-08 09:22:40

sime wrote:

I don't use dmenu with goomwwm, I don't even have it installed. I use number keys for launching few apps and invoke others via xterm when needed.
It would be nice if window switcher served dual purpose. Since it already allows entering text for narrowing down window choices, I think it would be great if it allowed launching apps too, if entered text doesn't match any already opened windows. Just a thought.

I'm now using surf (embedded in tabbed) and need dmenu in order to use it :) So I finally gave in and have dmenu system-wide :) Not sure what's my stance on this as it is standing now. It is a tricky matter and in my opinion goomwwm should either continue with dmenu and current window switcher or completely dump dmenu and implement integrated solution for both things. Having something in-between doesn't seem right.

sime · 2012-08-08 09:57:21

Scratch that. Just tried goomwwm experimental menu branch and I must say it's exactly what I wanted. For some reason I never liked dmenu.

Now if I only could find a browser I am 99% happy with.

aerosuidae, I tried meme, but you only have 1.0 tarball on the site which crashes all the time, as soon as you look at it, I think it never lasted more than 5 seconds... Will you put it on GitHub soon?

sime · 2012-08-08 10:18:15

Bug report (menu branch): when using menuselect modkeyup the quick launcher on M-F12 disappears on key release (logical behavior but it renders quick launch dialog useless). I don't use modkeyup (already used to static nature of menu) but tried it briefly and spotted this.

Last edited by sime (2012-08-08 10:34:51)

aerosuidae · 2012-08-08 14:40:12

@sime

Menu branch bug report logged, thanks. I guess modkeyup will have to stay as-is for the window switcher, but it does make sense to always turn it off for the plain launcher.

Ok, meme is now on github here: https://github.com/seanpringle/meme. A diff of that source against the original 1.0 tgz tree shows various small changes. None of them (that I recall) were explicitly to fix a crashing bug, so all I can say is that this version does not crash on my Arch box... ymmv.

sime · 2012-08-08 15:02:23

@aerosuidae: thanks!

Using meme now without issues, so git HEAD works wonderfully for me...

Thanks to meme and goomwwm's menu branch I am now able to ditch surf, tabbed and dmenu all at once! :) Once again thanks to your continued support and dedication.

aerosuidae · 2012-08-08 15:21:14

A general update because I'm feeling all verbose

Some folks found goomwwm problems with:

xcompmgr freezing windows during transition to and from full-screen.
Virtualbox not refreshing borders properly when using guest additions and vboxdriver.

(@mikezackles I recall was using xcompmgr. Sorry if I've forgotten others... they may have been reports via email instead of the forum...)

Both these problems are to do with X window borders and not technically goomwwm bugs. xcompmgr is experiencing X event sync issues and messing up it's rendering when goomwwm toggles borders for apps moving to and from full-screen. vboxdriver is not getting redraw events for borders at all in some cases because of the way it hooks into the X server.

Most reparenting WMs don't trigger these bugs because they turn off plain old X borders and use more complex parent frames instead so they can do title bars and buttons. Non-reparenting WMs that do use X borders can trigger one or both bugs, eg xmonad triggers the vboxdriver issue.

I've started an Improved Borders experimental branch to tackle this. It keeps goomwwm as a simple, non-reparenting WM, but cheats a bit by using a coloured frame window just slightly larger than the app window and stacked underneath, instead of X borders.

So far, this allows me to run xcompmgr without freezing problems and the vboxdriver drawing glitches are removed on my test box. If anyone else wants to test it out, please report bugs!

Last edited by aerosuidae (2012-08-08 15:22:14)

aerosuidae · 2012-08-10 05:48:02

Continuing the update:

goomwwm 1.0 is out today and the aur package has been updated. It's stable enough; I'll fix any critical bugs that show up here, but nothing that affects functionality or is merely cosmetic.

The master branch in git has today diverged a lot in preparation for goomwmm 1.1 (yay!) and the improvedborders and menu branches have been merged in. This will affect anyone using the git aur package. Seems to run ok, but no promises. If you don't like it, you now have a nice v1.0 to use instead

Last edited by aerosuidae (2012-08-10 05:52:26)

bgc1954 · 2012-08-10 18:08:57

Just found another curiosity. I was trying to play Diablo 2 LOD in wine on my desktop. I've been having problems with the newest wine and this game running in fullscreen. I was running it in windowed mode and it runs fine but it's a small window and doesn't make the game very enjoyable. I stumbled upon a post that suggested forcing wine to use direct draw using a -d3d flag at the end of my wine command and I suddenly had fullscreen--which hasn't worked for months. I did find out, however, that my keyboard became unresponsive. My mouse still worked but no keyboard. I googled the problem and funny enough found a bug report filed by me for musca. Someone suggested running in stacking mode in musca so I thought I'd try modkey+f in goomwwm. Amazingly, I got back the keyboard function. I just wonder where the keyboard input goes when it's not in fullscreen mode?

aerosuidae · 2012-08-13 00:48:23

@bgc1954, thanks for the report.

I don't have wine installed right now -- mainly because I hate it -- but I've had a look at the wine D3D source code with your report in mind:

It looks like they use multiple windows to handle full-screen direct3d with keyboard focus going to one window and screen rendering to another; and they apparently make use of override_redirect for the drawing window; and then they try to stack the windows in a specific order.

My guess is the stacking step is getting blocked with goomwwm's normal policy of refusing automatic window raising, and the focus is switching around behind the drawing window.

I've committed a change to goomwwm-git that allows automatic raising for non-managed windows. Would be interesting to know if it makes any difference for your game.

If it doesn't help, try starting the game and collecting xwininfo output from another tty:

export DISPLAY=:0
xwininfo -tree -root

Pastebin it, maybe, if it's long?

Last edited by aerosuidae (2012-08-13 00:56:56)

bgc1954 · 2012-08-13 17:17:35

Whatever you did works splendidly. Thanks aerosuidae!

There is still a small glitch on my desktop which was present before git-20120813 but I didn't mention it before. Diablo starts up with a few introductory screens which I used to skip with my left mouse button. The screens are drawn way offscreen but you can bring them back to the middle by moving the mouse to the edges of the screen. If I click to skip through the screens, Diablo freezes and I have to use modkey+close to close it. By fiddling around I found I can successfully skip the screens by using the enter key. Once you get to the game screen itself you can click away all you want and the keyboard works as it should too without having to use modkey+f.

I believe this has something to do with nvidia graphics as my netbook, which uses intel, works fine with the new git pkg. It too would freeze with mouse clicks before 20120813. And my netbook never experienced the screens being drawn offscreen--if that makes any sense.

There have been several issues with nvidia and wine for me over the years so I'm not a huge fan of wine either, but it does keep me from almost ever using my win xp dual boot. Playing Diablo thru wine doesn't help much either as those introductory screens are a different resolution so things get a little hairy sometimes when diablo switches between 640x480 & 800x600 and my native resolution is 1280x1024.

Last edited by bgc1954 (2012-08-13 17:48:04)

bgc1954 · 2012-08-13 17:41:34

I don't know if it's a result of your fix for my game or something else but now when resizing windows with modkey +mouse_button_3, the window turns blue as soon as you click the mouse button--resizing still works but the window stays blue until you release the mouse button. It didn't do that before, IIRC.

aerosuidae · 2012-08-14 00:46:47

bgc1954 wrote:

I don't know if it's a result of your fix for my game or something else but now when resizing windows with modkey +mouse_button_3, the window turns blue ...

That's a work in progress. The blue window is a temporary overlay created for faster mouse-driven move/resize and also some experiments I'm doing with moving tiled windows as one. Eventually it may become a border or grid and have a config setting.

Last edited by aerosuidae (2012-08-14 00:47:10)

yellowrabbit · 2012-08-15 07:22:23

Hello.
More than a year I use musca. I love it:) I got used to switch between workspaces with Mod-[1234567890-=]. It's some kind of muscle-memory.
Whether there is a possibility of switch between tags in goomwwm with same keys?

aerosuidae · 2012-08-15 13:37:08

@yellowrabbit, there is no option yet to change those keys but I'll add it to the feature request list.

aerosuidae · 2012-08-18 03:41:22

Small update:

I'm working through a list of feature requests for v1.1. One is having optional window title bars because some folks don't like my -flashtitle idea... crazy people

So, the git version now has a -titlebar <height> config option (height in pixels, default: 0). They aren't fancy; just a thicker top border with a centred title, no menus, no buttons. Enjoy or ignore to taste.

Arch Linux

#201 2012-07-27 17:41:05

Re: goomwwm: Get out of my way, window manager!

#202 2012-07-27 20:05:59

Re: goomwwm: Get out of my way, window manager!

#203 2012-07-28 14:00:01

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#205 2012-07-30 03:31:45

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#206 2012-08-05 21:11:21

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#207 2012-08-07 02:39:52

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#209 2012-08-07 16:38:55

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#211 2012-08-08 09:22:40

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#217 2012-08-10 05:48:02

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#218 2012-08-10 18:08:57

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#219 2012-08-13 00:48:23

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#220 2012-08-13 17:17:35

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#221 2012-08-13 17:41:34

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#222 2012-08-14 00:46:47

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#223 2012-08-15 07:22:23

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#224 2012-08-15 13:37:08

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#225 2012-08-18 03:41:22

Re: goomwwm: Get out of my way, window manager!

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