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#1 2012-12-17 00:53:22

taylorchu
Member
Registered: 2010-08-09
Posts: 405

if you were asked to build a tiling wm, what is your design?

i think the main purpose is to gather some ideas, since i am going to build one during holidays.

my initial thought is:
1. tabbed , like browser, each tab takes one full screen
2. status bar at the bottom, tabs at the top
3. you can have infinite tab (app) per desktop
4. my sister says that it is better to have only 2 desktops
5. dual tab mode, you can merge two tabs into one tab, and view them side by side. (couple)
you can break them later to 2 tabs (decouple)
6. some simple notification
7. all-tab grid wall to show all opened apps, and switch to any of them.
8. dmenu

what do you think?


"After you do enough distro research, you will choose Arch."

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#2 2012-12-17 00:54:56

flipper T
Member
Registered: 2012-09-14
Posts: 419

Re: if you were asked to build a tiling wm, what is your design?

Yes, and I would call it i3wm, perhaps.

[edit : on reflection, sorry for being glib, but most of features listed can be easily achieved by i3wm....I am a big fan smile ]

ps perhaps you could focus your talents on improving an existing wm, rather than adding to the plethora of choices.

pps thanks for opportunity to use the word "plethora"

smile

Last edited by flipper T (2012-12-17 01:42:59)


If I'm curt with you it's because time is a factor. I think fast, I talk fast and I need you guys to act fast if you wanna get out of this. So, pretty please... with sugar on top. Clean the [censored] car. -The Wolf

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#3 2012-12-17 03:57:19

ahammel
Member
Registered: 2012-05-01
Posts: 23

Re: if you were asked to build a tiling wm, what is your design?

i3 indeed has all of those except the grid wall and the two-desktop limit (why would you want that?)


Laptop: Arch+i3                    Personal file sever: Slackware                   Work PC: Fedora+wmii
Work file sever: FreeBSD       Work application server: Scientific Linux

I'm an addict.

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#4 2012-12-17 04:08:19

drcouzelis
Member
From: Connecticut, USA
Registered: 2009-11-09
Posts: 4,092
Website

Re: if you were asked to build a tiling wm, what is your design?

taylorchu wrote:

1. tabbed , like browser, each tab takes one full screen
2. status bar at the bottom, tabs at the top
3. you can have infinite tab (app) per desktop
4. my sister says that it is better to have only 2 desktops
5. dual tab mode, you can merge two tabs into one tab, and view them side by side. (couple)
you can break them later to 2 tabs (decouple)
6. some simple notification
7. all-tab grid wall to show all opened apps, and switch to any of them.
8. dmenu

what do you think?

I think that sounds surprisingly similar to Windows 8. yikes

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#5 2012-12-17 04:10:38

WonderWoofy
Member
From: Los Gatos, CA
Registered: 2012-05-19
Posts: 8,414

Re: if you were asked to build a tiling wm, what is your design?

Yeah, I think you shold do away with the two desktop limit. 

One thing I really liked about wmii that is not present in i3 is the ability to assign a given window (tab) to more than one desktop.

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#6 2012-12-17 04:15:33

paris3200
Member
Registered: 2012-12-08
Posts: 22

Re: if you were asked to build a tiling wm, what is your design?

I'm with WonderWoofy,  do away with the two desktop limit.  I started using Awesome this week.  Prior to this I used desktop environments with multiple work spaces but never made use of any of them.  Now that I'm running awesome I'm loving having the 9 tags.

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#7 2012-12-18 21:23:18

Gullible Jones
Member
Registered: 2004-12-29
Posts: 4,863

Re: if you were asked to build a tiling wm, what is your design?

This sounds somewhat similar to Ratpoison (which I love) so I'd suggest allowing the use of key chains, as per Ratpoison. e.g. with Ctrl-t as the modkey, you would hit Ctrl-t, then (for instance) k to close the focused window, or c to open an xterm, etc. IMO this makes it easier to remember keybindings, and cuts down on the number of key conflicts (though Ctrl-t is not such a great default choice, since it gets in the way of browsers).

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#8 2012-12-19 16:17:29

ahammel
Member
Registered: 2012-05-01
Posts: 23

Re: if you were asked to build a tiling wm, what is your design?

I usually use the super-key as the mod key so there aren't conflicts with other apps.

OP: The grid wall and multiple-tag tabs sound like cool features, but if it was me I'd implement them by hacking i3 rather than building from scratch. The i3 source is apparently designed to be hackable anyway.

Let us know what you come up with. I'll give it a try!


Laptop: Arch+i3                    Personal file sever: Slackware                   Work PC: Fedora+wmii
Work file sever: FreeBSD       Work application server: Scientific Linux

I'm an addict.

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#9 2012-12-22 16:33:57

teateawhy
Member
From: GER
Registered: 2012-03-05
Posts: 1,138
Website

Re: if you were asked to build a tiling wm, what is your design?

taylorchu wrote:

1. ... 3. & 5

These features are already present in i3, it might be worth creating your own in any way.

taylorchu wrote:

4.

I think you can have the limit to 2 workspaces in i3 by removing the keybinding for other workspaces from 3 to 10.

taylorchu wrote:

7. all-tab grid wall to show all opened apps, and switch to any of them.

This is a unique feature, i am looking forward to it.
If you can hack this feature into i3 you'd make us happy and save yourself a lot of work.

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#10 2012-12-22 16:37:00

Trilby
Inspector Parrot
Registered: 2011-11-29
Posts: 29,422
Website

Re: if you were asked to build a tiling wm, what is your design?

The tab concept from i3 inspired the design of ttwm (see sig), but i3 is a reparenting WM which adds a load of complexity.  Feel free to check out the ttwm code for a bare bones version of some of the features you mentioned.  Digging into i3's code is a bit daunting.


"UNIX is simple and coherent..." - Dennis Ritchie, "GNU's Not UNIX" -  Richard Stallman

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#11 2012-12-23 18:18:15

tlvb
Member
From: Sweden
Registered: 2008-10-06
Posts: 297
Website

Re: if you were asked to build a tiling wm, what is your design?

I were at the starting line to write one, some time ago—but then I got distracted/ran out of free time—whatever.
The design concepts that I had thought out were roughly: (warning, braindump)
- manual tiling
- No special way of window navigation/resizing/moving/removing/handling is enforced as an effect of the windows being stored in any kind of distinct data structure, it is basically a floating window manager with advanced auto-snapping. Eg, having the desktop split in a 2x2 layout, one would be able to resize the upper left window, increasing it's width, and depending on the users choice, only the upper right window would decrease in width—orthe lower right window would also decrease in width—or in addition to the previous, the lower left window would also increase in width.
Same goes for moving windows.
- Modal keyboard interface. (vim)
- Tabs
- On the fly macro recording (vim's q) enabling a single keybind to e.g. Say that you have two editors open in the same space/different tabs on the left, and corresponding terminals in tabs to the right, then it should be possible to quickly create a keybind that would have the left tab area switch between editor1/2 and the right tab area switch between terminal1/2.


I need a sorted list of all random numbers, so that I can retrieve a suitable one later with a binary search instead of having to iterate through the generation process every time.

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#12 2012-12-24 01:23:48

dolby
Member
From: 1992
Registered: 2006-08-08
Posts: 1,581

Re: if you were asked to build a tiling wm, what is your design?

Ratpoison with a minimilistic panel integrated.


There shouldn't be any reason to learn more editor types than emacs or vi -- mg (1)
[You learn that sarcasm does not often work well in international forums.  That is why we avoid it. -- ewaller (arch linux forum moderator)

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