Alopex: a tiling tagging tabbed window manager with fur

bgc1954 · 2012-10-06 21:28:36

I'm using a PKGBUILD with a custom .ttwm_conf.h as is noted in the PKGBUILD and while building the package it says it's using the custom config.h. I'll try just building alone and see what happens.

Also, I thought that the little cpu status bar disappeared when setting STATUSBARSPACE to 0 but I was wrong. Just noticed that it still shows up.

Last edited by bgc1954 (2012-10-06 22:12:30)

2ManyDogs · 2012-10-06 21:31:18

Oh, OK. I just build with make and make install.

bgc1954 · 2012-10-06 21:56:40

Sorry Trilby, just forget everything I just posted. Somehow when I was trying out ttwm before I copied the executable ttwm to my ~/bin folder and everytime I was making a new pkg the old ttwm in ~/bin was being executed. Duh, I feel real dumb now.

I'm still trying to figure out the best way to display my conky but now at least I have the new tabs, numlock works,key combos work, and clock color is responding.

Trilby · 2012-10-07 05:09:16

Cool, glad most of that is working out.

The STATUSBARSPACE option is brand new. What is now "tbars" was hardcoded in before and I just separated them. There are many known quirks I still have to iron out and undoubtedly many unknown quirks still waiting to be found. Currently a dzen/conky bar would have to be lined up with ~~top-right~~top-left coordinates of x=70,y=0 (70 may not be exact I'll double check) and a width equal to what you set for STATUSBARSPACE. I only dabbled with conky very briefly and only tried running dzen once. I do not know these tools or if/how they could be best used to fit in the space left by ttwm.

If there are certain requirements or restrictions, or anything that would make it easier to use these tools let me know. I will depend on input for this as, again, I do not use them. No space can currently be reserved on the right half of the screen. This is intentional but need not be permanent. It is intentional as the right side has the stack-tabs which should be more numerous than the single master tab, so the left side seems to be a more fitting place for information bars. But this is just a first draft of the STATUSBARSPACE setting.

edit: fixed coordinate reference - sometimes I know my right from left.

Last edited by Trilby (2012-10-07 16:35:37)

bgc1954 · 2012-10-07 15:45:59

Thx Trilby. You're right -x value for dzen is 70 and for what I have in my conky I need a STATUSBARSPACE of 240. This is how it looks:

I'm really liking the monocle mode too. Kind of reminds me of i3.

Trilby · 2012-10-07 16:37:21

Cool wallpaper. Your screenshot reminds me I need to get around to setting a fontwidth variable based on the user selected font so the workspace indicators don't overlap with the clock for some fonts.

Last edited by Trilby (2012-10-07 16:37:39)

bgc1954 · 2012-10-07 17:14:02

While my dzen/conky works well, I was just wondering if it would be possible to just pipe conky alone into the statusbar like in dwm. There I can just use

conky | while read -r; do xsetroot -name "$REPLY"; done &

which I tried in ttwm but it doesn't seem to work. If it means a bunch of new code just forget I asked for it.

Trilby · 2012-10-07 17:39:10

I just pushed some changes that now calculate statusbar sizes/positions based on the selected font. So, among other improvements, the workspace indicators should not overlap the clock with any font choice. I have not, however, tested this with any other fonts than those I use - feedback would be appreciated.

edit for better info: The changes to the config.h are limited to the first handful of lines - these should be easy to merge with any custom config. As suggested by the comment line, barheight is now a variable and is optional. If it is set to 0 (zero) the barheight is set as the font ascent + descent + 2 for one pixel above and below the text. You can set any other barheight you'd like if you want a bulkier or slimmer bar.

----------

bgc, it would be pretty easy to read the root window name and put that text up in the status region. What would be much harder is having color codes and formatting in the text. There is a massive amount of code in dwm that is dedicated to just that functionality.

I will not add this back in to ttwm itself, though I can imagine having a complimentary tool to do this for those who want it. But this would then essentially be yet-another-dzen program. That does sound like a fun project that I might take on at some point, but given the abundance of existing tools to do just this, I'd just suggest going with one of them.

In addition to dzen I think moetunes somesortabar does something like this. There are a number of others too.

EDIT: OK, I guess I don't really know why dwm needed so much code for this. TTWM now can read from its stdin or a program passed as its first argument and display incoming information in the status bar with colors and more.

Last edited by Trilby (2012-10-30 11:53:27)

bgc1954 · 2012-10-07 18:41:02

@Trilby:

The statusbar changes work great with good, old terminus-font from community repo--the spacing is much better and the workspace indicator doesn't overlap the clock anymore. Thx. Like I said, just forget about the piped conky since it sounds like more trouble than its worth. After all, the point of the whole exercise is to keep it tiny, right!

2ManyDogs · 2012-10-07 19:08:35

bgc1954 wrote:

@Trilby:
Like I said, just forget about the piped conky since it sounds like more trouble than its worth.

I agree. There's enough status bar there now, and anyone who wants more has plenty of ways to do it.

Last edited by 2ManyDogs (2012-10-07 19:43:17)

Trilby · 2012-10-08 03:19:11

So I had some time and I made a flexible status bar app.

I'll put together a PKGBUILD and start a thread for it tomorrow, but for now you can check it out on github: https://github.com/TrilbyWhite/RectaBar

Rectabar reads input from stdin, can colorize text, draw shapes (rectangles), and overlap any of these for some nice drawing effects ... all in 87 lines of C. There is a short demo with it on github which shows some of what it can do while demonstrating the syntax for the brace-commands (i.e. "{command}") if you view the script contents.

Last edited by Trilby (2012-10-08 03:23:41)

bgc1954 · 2012-10-08 15:55:31

I was going to try rectabar this AM but cannot git clone it--it asks for username and password. I'll try to just copy and paste the code and report back on it later.

Trilby · 2012-10-08 16:00:46

Odd. I'm still very much a git-noob, but I tried cloning it from my work computer and it didn't ask for a password.

2ManyDogs · 2012-10-08 17:06:45

I just cloned it onto my test machine without a password.

And I just have to say Trilby, with the addition of monocle mode and the ability to leave a space for conky, ttwm is just about perfect for me now. Thanks.

Last edited by 2ManyDogs (2012-10-08 17:06:58)

bgc1954 · 2012-10-08 17:49:52

Yes, it is weird. I can git clone ttwm no problem. Don't know what's going on at my end as you guys don't seem to have a problem. But I got copy and paste to work so I'm playing around with rectabar. It doesn't seem to like conky input for me but I am trying out other methods and have some cpu, ram and temp input that I'm fine tuning. Conky is simpler but I needed something to do this morning anyway. I like tinkering too.

And BTW, your demos are very cool!

Last edited by bgc1954 (2012-10-08 17:53:11)

Trilby · 2012-10-08 18:05:34

Thanks. I'm not sure what format conky outputs in. If you can give some samples or explanations I might be able to get it to play nice with conky.

2ManyDogs · 2012-10-08 18:41:22

Trilby wrote:

Thanks. I'm not sure what format conky outputs in. If you can give some samples or explanations I might be able to get it to play nice with conky.

In its simplest form, conky just writes plain text to stdout and we pipe the output to a bar or dzen2. Here is a super-simple conkyrc file that writes to stdout:

# conky configuration for tiling window managers status bar 

out_to_x no
background no
out_to_console yes
update_interval 1
total_run_times 0

TEXT
cpu: ${cpu cpu0}% | mem: $memperc% ($mem) | root: ${fs_used_perc /}%

And here is the command I use to pipe it through dzen2 to its location on the ttwm status bar (dzen does the display and positioning):

conky -c /media/shared/conky/conkyrc-ttwm | dzen2 -x 70 -y 2 -w 300 -h 14 -fn -*-terminus-medium-*-*-*-*-12-*-*-*-*-*-*

Other tilers can use this conky on their bars as well. The spectrwm bar reads from stdin, and dwm uses the root window name so you just pipe the conky output to xsetroot and set the root-window name:

(conky -c /media/shared/conky/conkyrc-dwm | while read LINE; do xsetroot -name "$LINE"; done) &

wmfs uses a similar mechanism.

If you set rectabar up to read from stdin (or display the root window name) it could be used with conky or any status script that writes output to stdout.

Honestly, conky and dzen2 is good enough for me. But I can see you really like to tinker, so you'll probably add this functionality to rectabar soon.

Last edited by 2ManyDogs (2012-10-08 18:54:08)

Trilby · 2012-10-08 18:55:02

Yup, rectabar reads from stdin and displays what it reads. I was curious about formatting - if conky outputs any sort of color codes they wouldn't match rectabar's arbitrary command notation.

I suppose if conky writes any braces ({}) to stdout it would screw up rectabar as it would try to interpret these as indicators of a rectabar command.

2ManyDogs · 2012-10-08 18:58:44

Conky doesn't send color codes to stdout -- we have to use dzen2 to get a colored conky. And the braces don't get output unless someone puts them in the plain text. ${command argument} is a conky command and the braces are not printed. If rectabar uses similar syntax, conky may be confused if there are rectabar commands in the TEXT.

Sorry for the long post full of stuff you already knew... I'm happy enough with dzen2 that I haven't even tried rectabar. If I find some time I'll try to test it.

Last edited by 2ManyDogs (2012-10-08 19:06:45)

bgc1954 · 2012-10-08 21:54:35

Rectabar works fine. It killed a few hours with me trying to input the same kind of stuff as conky with a bash script--I'm not the best script writer but I cobbled together some stuff which rectabar dutifully displayed in ttwm. Conky/dzen is easier to work with for me, but rectabar is a great alternative if someone wants to display bars--I kind of like plain old text.

bgc1954 · 2012-10-09 16:02:54

@Trilby:

Just noticed something while in firefox. I was trying to view pics my daughter sent me and when the new window opens to either view or download the pic, the OK button was grayed out. When I hit mod+up to switch to monocle mode, the ok button was there again and I could view the pic. The next pic I tried to view, the OK button was grayed out in the monocle window and when I hit mod+down to switch back to multiple windows, I got the OK button back again or if I switch windows using mod+j/k I could get the OK button back. Haven't used ttwm enough to know if this is regular behavior since focus is keyboard driven but in monocle mode it doesn't seem that when opening a new window the focus should shift to the new window... or not?

2ManyDogs · 2012-10-09 16:05:19

I have also had some problems with dialogs opened in monocle mode, but I have not identified a pattern. It may be similar to or the same as what bgc1954 is seeing.

Trilby · 2012-10-09 16:15:52

Yes, I suspect this is poor management of the focus settings. This has been one thing that has always nagged at me - its not as simple as it seems.

It is *very* simple to focus a window - a single function call in fact to XFocusWindow. But managing which window should get focus at which time has given me a few headaches.

I'll try to replicate this issue and work on a better focusing pattern.

bgc1954 · 2012-10-09 19:14:45

I've found that this focus behavior is easy to replicate if trying to download a file--like arch.iso--in firefox. The OK in the window will be grayed out until you shift away to another window and then back again. Happens every time. Funny enough, apps like midori or pcmanfm seem to gain focus when opening a new window without this behavior??

Trilby · 2012-10-09 22:08:58

Odd. I don't have firefox on my work computer, and I was unable to replicate this with any other program. I just got home and tried firefox on my home computer, and I still can't replicate it in either master+stack or monocle mode.

Given that you both experience this, it certainly is a problem, but I don't know how to investigate further until I can replicate it. Do you see similar problems with any other programs?

I did look back at the relevant code, and it should work as desired. The troublesome bits I was frustrated with previously were only really when windows were closed or workspaces changed.

Last edited by Trilby (2012-10-09 22:11:37)

Arch Linux

#76 2012-10-06 21:28:36

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

#77 2012-10-06 21:31:18

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

#78 2012-10-06 21:56:40

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

#79 2012-10-07 05:09:16

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

#80 2012-10-07 15:45:59

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

#81 2012-10-07 16:37:21

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

#82 2012-10-07 17:14:02

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

#83 2012-10-07 17:39:10

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

#84 2012-10-07 18:41:02

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

#85 2012-10-07 19:08:35

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

#86 2012-10-08 03:19:11

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

#87 2012-10-08 15:55:31

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

#88 2012-10-08 16:00:46

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

#89 2012-10-08 17:06:45

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

#90 2012-10-08 17:49:52

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

#91 2012-10-08 18:05:34

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

#92 2012-10-08 18:41:22

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

#93 2012-10-08 18:55:02

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

#94 2012-10-08 18:58:44

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

#95 2012-10-08 21:54:35

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

#96 2012-10-09 16:02:54

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

#97 2012-10-09 16:05:19

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

#98 2012-10-09 16:15:52

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

#99 2012-10-09 19:14:45

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

#100 2012-10-09 22:08:58

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

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