Bluetile: And still another tiling window manager (based on Xmonad)

skottish · 2009-09-20 17:41:10

http://projects.haskell.org/bluetile/

It's an offshoot of Xmonad that looks like it has a sane stacking mode. Has anyone tried it?

Lich · 2009-09-20 17:46:23

skottish wrote:

http://projects.haskell.org/bluetile/
It's an offshoot of Xmonad that looks like it has a sane stacking mode. Has anyone tried it?

How's this different from xmonad, or some other tilers for that matter? From their description I see nothing that's been "missing" from the tiling world.

Vintendo · 2009-09-20 17:53:01

The combination between a tiler and a floater. This would be ideal for my girlfriend, who wants a tiling window manager at times but nothing difficult. The switching and resizing with a mouse is amazing.

skottish · 2009-09-20 17:54:54

Lich wrote:

skottish wrote:
http://projects.haskell.org/bluetile/
It's an offshoot of Xmonad that looks like it has a sane stacking mode. Has anyone tried it?
How's this different from xmonad, or some other tilers for that matter? From their description I see nothing that's been "missing" from the tiling world.

I do. I haven't run across a single tiling window manager that handles stacking mode in a useful way. I've been looking for something that when I'm not doing serious work is a full featured stacking WM, but when I'm working is a full featured tiling WM. I don't want to switch back and for with X sessions, nor to I want to maintain two separate WMs. If this thing handles stacking properly, maybe it will get back ported to Xmonad.

skualito · 2009-09-20 17:55:34

EDIT: nevermind, it's on the homepage
Have a look at the screencast http://vimeo.com/6661713

Last edited by skualito (2009-09-20 18:02:24)

flamelab · 2009-09-20 17:58:22

Can someone make a PKGBUILD for it ?

Lich · 2009-09-20 19:20:29

skottish wrote:

Lich wrote:
skottish wrote:
http://projects.haskell.org/bluetile/
It's an offshoot of Xmonad that looks like it has a sane stacking mode. Has anyone tried it?
How's this different from xmonad, or some other tilers for that matter? From their description I see nothing that's been "missing" from the tiling world.
I do. I haven't run across a single tiling window manager that handles stacking mode in a useful way. I've been looking for something that when I'm not doing serious work is a full featured stacking WM, but when I'm working is a full featured tiling WM. I don't want to switch back and for with X sessions, nor to I want to maintain two separate WMs. If this thing handles stacking properly, maybe it will get back ported to Xmonad.

What more do you need than to be able to cycle trough and move the stacked windows? Xmonad already has this at the push of a button..so to speak. Ion3 has this too. wmii too, even though I don't use floats often. All you need is to set your layout to floating and poof, you wouldn't even know you're running a tiler. In ion3 you even got titlebars so you can move your floats around the screen like with any normal WM. This is a really bad reason to write another wm IMO. oh well.

skualito · 2009-09-20 19:42:49

You might want to read about the "reasons" to write yet another wm
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang … onad/7458/

Last edited by skualito (2009-09-20 19:43:46)

skottish · 2009-09-20 19:46:26

Lich wrote:

What more do you need than to be able to cycle trough and move the stacked windows? Xmonad already has this at the push of a button..so to speak. Ion3 has this too. wmii too, even though I don't use floats often. All you need is to set your layout to floating and poof, you wouldn't even know you're running a tiler. In ion3 you even got titlebars so you can move your floats around the screen like with any normal WM. This is a really bad reason to write another wm IMO. oh well.

XMonad's (0.8.1) stacking is poor at best. It gets confused if there's more than one instance of a program running at the same time, the Z-order is backwards (new windows open under older ones), by default click to raise is only possible with a modifier (fixable, of course), etc. The situation is slightly better with the version from darcs. Awesome doesn't remember window geometry and position for toggling back and forth, as well as switching between full screen layouts. Every other tiling WM that I've tried suffers from one or more of these problems. Musca comes close, but there's still some issues (probably bugs). Of course having windows always open up in the top left corner isn't very useful when working with a mouse. I'm sure that could have been scripted out of some of these, but there's no point when something to everything else is so inefficient.

****** BIG EDIT *******

I want to be clear. I'm not talking about stacking single programs. I'm talking about stacking modes, as in everything.

bernarcher · 2009-09-20 20:07:57

Main drawback to me as far as I can tell from the project homepage is that you cannot easily define your own shortcuts (at least currently). I wonder whether Bluetile really could replace my current openbox + pytyle (I have set up more than 60 shortcuts there - and regularly use most of them).

skottish · 2009-09-20 20:46:16

bernarcher wrote:

Main drawback to me as far as I can tell from the project homepage is that you cannot easily define your own shortcuts (at least currently). I wonder whether Bluetile really could replace my current openbox + pytyle (I have set up more than 60 shortcuts there - and regularly use most of them).

It does mention that you have to edit the source on the home page. That's really not that different than the situation with Xmonad once you know where in the source that changes need to be made.

Ghost1227 · 2009-09-20 20:51:57

This looks quite interesting... I may have to try it out

vogt · 2009-09-21 01:15:40

flamelab wrote:

Can someone make a PKGBUILD for it ?

You actually need 3 pkgbuilds:

A pkgbuild for Cabal2arch can be found here:
http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=17471

Using cabal2arch, generate the pkgbuilds from the cabal files:

cabal2arch http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/xmonad-bluetilebranch/0.8.1.3/xmonad-bluetilebranch.cabal
cabal2arch http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/xmonad-contrib-bluetilebranch/0.8.1.3/xmonad-contrib-bluetilebranch.cabal
cabal2arch http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/bluetile/0.3/bluetile.cabal

And then inside the generated directories run makepkg (in the same order they were generated in).

You will need some additional dependencies, most of which should be in the repos (otherwise check the aur).

skottish · 2009-09-21 03:10:03

Yikes! Un-installed.

mikesd · 2009-09-21 04:07:33

I really like the name Bluetile and can see how it would suit some people but I'll be sticking with xmonad. I like being able to pick and choose from xmonad-contrib and the ability to edit, recompile and seamlessly rerun is way cool. Perhaps it will be a tiling window manager for the general public with power users *graduating* to xmonad.

There is *some* talk on the xmonad mailing list of some of Bluetile's patches being merged back into xmonad proper. Not sure if any have been yet. I think only one has been suggested at this point. That might be handy depending on what functionality they hold.

skottish · 2009-09-21 04:39:36

mikesd wrote:

There is *some* talk on the xmonad mailing list of some of Bluetile's patches being merged back into xmonad proper. Not sure if any have been yet. I think only one has been suggested at this point. That might be handy depending on what functionality they hold.

They're starting the work on rewriting the floating layer too. If they get it right, I'll probably become a Xmonad convert. My Haskell skills aren't so good at the moment, or I'd jump in and help.

rada · 2009-09-21 05:30:49

skottish wrote:

XMonad's (0.8.1) stacking is poor at best. It gets confused if there's more than one instance of a program running at the same time, the Z-order is backwards (new windows open under older ones), by default click to raise is only possible with a modifier (fixable, of course), etc. The situation is slightly better with the version from darcs.

Agreed. Tilers handling of floats sucks currently, and xmonad's in particular, although I don't think it's normally as bad as you're saying. It sounds like you may have a manageHook messing up defaults (which is to open new floats over, not under, currently focused.) Aside from the SimpleFloat layout, which behaves pretty nicely, (and seems to be the guts of bluetile's floating setup), it does take some work to have xmonad handle floating windows well. Actions.FloatSnap and Hooks.Place in darcs xmonad make
it much much nicer for people who like using lots of floats.

Normally I raise windows with mod-enter (shiftMaster) or capslock-scrollwheel, which I have on swapUp/swapDown. But agreed, sometimes you just want plain old mouse manipulation. Hopefully merging as much as possible of the bluetile stuff will make things better.

Just ran across this helper for manage hooks, too, which might be useful for you.

Last edited by rada (2009-09-21 05:39:57)

mikesd · 2009-09-21 08:05:18

skottish wrote:

They're starting the work on rewriting the floating layer too. If they get it right, I'll probably become a Xmonad convert. My Haskell skills aren't so good at the moment, or I'd jump in and help.

I often refer to the example configs on the xmonad website and the xmonad mailing list.

The mailing list in particular is quite amazing. Very low noise and extremely helpful people. My Haskell skills are far less than stellar and with these two resources I scrape by.

Arch Linux

#1 2009-09-20 17:41:10

Bluetile: And still another tiling window manager (based on Xmonad)

#2 2009-09-20 17:46:23

Re: Bluetile: And still another tiling window manager (based on Xmonad)

#3 2009-09-20 17:53:01

Re: Bluetile: And still another tiling window manager (based on Xmonad)

#4 2009-09-20 17:54:54

Re: Bluetile: And still another tiling window manager (based on Xmonad)

#5 2009-09-20 17:55:34

Re: Bluetile: And still another tiling window manager (based on Xmonad)

#6 2009-09-20 17:58:22

Re: Bluetile: And still another tiling window manager (based on Xmonad)

#7 2009-09-20 19:20:29

Re: Bluetile: And still another tiling window manager (based on Xmonad)

#8 2009-09-20 19:42:49

Re: Bluetile: And still another tiling window manager (based on Xmonad)

#9 2009-09-20 19:46:26

Re: Bluetile: And still another tiling window manager (based on Xmonad)

#10 2009-09-20 20:07:57

Re: Bluetile: And still another tiling window manager (based on Xmonad)

#11 2009-09-20 20:46:16

Re: Bluetile: And still another tiling window manager (based on Xmonad)

#12 2009-09-20 20:51:57

Re: Bluetile: And still another tiling window manager (based on Xmonad)

#13 2009-09-21 01:15:40

Re: Bluetile: And still another tiling window manager (based on Xmonad)

#14 2009-09-21 03:10:03

Re: Bluetile: And still another tiling window manager (based on Xmonad)

#15 2009-09-21 04:07:33

Re: Bluetile: And still another tiling window manager (based on Xmonad)

#16 2009-09-21 04:39:36

Re: Bluetile: And still another tiling window manager (based on Xmonad)

#17 2009-09-21 05:30:49

Re: Bluetile: And still another tiling window manager (based on Xmonad)

#18 2009-09-21 08:05:18

Re: Bluetile: And still another tiling window manager (based on Xmonad)

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