Musca (Tiling Window Manager)

nem · 2011-08-09 07:46:06

good day.

during the last few days i dug through the sourcecode of musca and tried to fix some bugs. here are the results.

patchset 1 for musca-0.9.24

instructions:
  put 'musca_patchset.tar.gz' into the sourcedirectory, unpack it and execute 'prepare.sh'.
  this patches all fixes into the sourcetree. (make sure it's unaltered - else patching could fail)
  after that, proceed as you wish with 'make' and/or any other desired installmethod.
  if you would like to omit a patch for some reason, just delete the according patchfile in advance.

this patchset includes folling fixes:
- fix incompatibility with dmenu-4.4:
  configline for dmenu in config.h should now only contain dmenu parameters!
  same goes for 'set dmenu <dmenu-parameters-only>' in '.musca_start'.
  BE SURE TO TWEAK THAT BEFORE YOU RESTART MUSCA

- fix for (flash-)fullscreen bug which messed up cycle:
  this fixes some bugs from reports at musca-bugtracker which all originate from this single bug.

- fix for muscacommand 'pad' to affect all windows on stack:
  this essentially fixes a segfault which was caused by 'focus_follow_mouse' hovering a nonpadded window.

get the patches and/or just the patchpack at github.

regards,
nem

mhertz · 2011-08-09 18:44:11

Thanks alot for your improvements; really appreciated!

nem · 2011-08-11 12:22:16

good day.

since musca most probably gets removed from [community] sooner or later (i already talked to the maintainer about it) i created an aur-package musca-fixed. this also includes all patches i posted above to make things easier.

regards,
nem

Last edited by nem (2011-08-11 12:24:59)

cmlr · 2011-08-11 17:17:18

Thanks! musca-fixed takes care of all the problems I have.

cmlr · 2011-08-11 17:41:58

Actually, one more request. When I have an empty rectangle, and I use feh to set the background, the picture in the rectangle does not change. Starting an application in the rectangle and then quitting the application will set the correct picture. Also, switching to another workspace and then back again gives the correct picture. So, I'd like to get the correct picture to appear from the beginning.

Inxsible · 2011-08-11 17:52:35

I think you can do that with the mucsa command for refreshing the screen. Its been a while since I used musca...so I don't remember the exact command

cmlr · 2011-08-11 19:00:19

Inxsible wrote:

I think you can do that with the mucsa command for refreshing the screen. Its been a while since I used musca...so I don't remember the exact command

That doesn't work for me. If it can be fixed, great, but it's not a life or death matter.

gorilla · 2011-08-11 19:51:57

feh [...]
sleep 3 && exec musca

in .xinitrc should solve your problems...

Last edited by gorilla (2011-08-11 19:54:05)

cmlr · 2011-08-11 21:09:40

gorilla wrote:

feh [...]
sleep 3 && exec musca
in .xinitrc should solve your problems...

Thanks, that worked exactly.

triggerb · 2011-08-12 01:49:52

Thank you so much for the patched package Nem! I've been using Musca quite a long time now, but I was looking to ditch it because the bugs were becoming too much of a daily issue. I trolled through the code, but wasn't nearly qualified enough with X11 to really grok it. Now I can keep using the best tiling WM that there is

nem · 2011-08-12 11:52:53

glad to be of help.
i'm currently wrapping my mind around musca internal workings. if there are any explicit ideas/bugfixes that someone wants to see integrated, feel free to drop a message and i'll see what i can/want to do. i went through this thread and saw that actually many things already got resolved with current behaviour. i am not using musca at 100% of it's capabilities myself yet, but maybe i come across some points which i want to see improved/fixed, too. so stay tuned.

Last edited by nem (2011-08-12 12:03:33)

cmlr · 2011-08-12 17:02:10

I recently added information about musca-fixed to the Musca wiki page. Please modify it as you see fit.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Musca

mhertz · 2011-08-13 17:23:37

Again, thanks alot for keeping the musca project alive! You seriously rock, nem!

Thanks again!

CU, Martin.

Last edited by mhertz (2011-08-13 17:24:04)

Baryon · 2011-08-13 22:16:26

Funny that you moved musca to AUR on the very day I decided to try it out; I got confused when I saw a "not found" error when trying to use pacman. Never mind, I've got it now and, as my first experience with a tiling window manager, I'm extremely impressed. I had to change all the keybindings to use mod1, though, since I'm one of the very few people who doesn't have a Super_L key.

A feature I'd like to have (and maybe it's available in another tiling wm; I don't know) is to be able to create a new group without having to specify a name, or even just open a new program in a new group. Because I don't seem to care what the groups are called, and sometimes I think I'd probably just like to have several full screen apps that I can switch between with the number keys... sorry - just a stream of consciousness here.

Thanks to nem for the bug fixes!

cmlr · 2011-08-14 00:13:09

Concerning the wiki page, why not just come out and say that musca-fixed is the by far the best version at this time? It certainly revived my interest in Musca, and many people in this thread feel the same way.

nem · 2011-08-14 03:19:06

Baryon wrote:

A feature I'd like to have (and maybe it's available in another tiling wm; I don't know) is to be able to create a new group without having to specify a name, or even just open a new program in a new group. Because I don't seem to care what the groups are called, and sometimes I think I'd probably just like to have several full screen apps that I can switch between with the number keys... sorry - just a stream of consciousness here.

cool. i basically implemented it by now - still have to do some finetuning (clear/alter relating stuff). stay tuned for the patch.

Sirsurthur · 2011-08-14 09:53:14

Thanks a lot Nem for your patches ! It really improves the day to day Musca use !

Another idea of patch (if you want and have time to) would be a binding mod4+f (for example) to make a frame fullscreen (border off and fullscreen). It could be particularly usefull for apps like mplayer for example and would prevent hacks like we all have in our config file !

Thanks again for your work !

Sirsurthur

gorilla · 2011-08-14 12:55:53

+1 for Sirsurthur's idea, it would be also nice, to turn the boder off when only one window is visable... (but not important)

Also want to say thanks to all who help continuing the development of musca. I probably switch back from dwm soon... One thing I like at dwm is the tagging of programs. Would it be a big deal to do this with musca optionally?

nem · 2011-08-14 14:21:39

good day.

because musca got moved from [community] to AUR there's a bit of redundancy. i merged my patches into the musca AUR package and requested deletion for musca-fixed. sorry for the hazzle, but it'd be no use having musca without patches in the AUR anyway.

Sirsurthur wrote:

Another idea of patch (if you want and have time to) would be a binding mod4+f (for example) to make a frame fullscreen (border off and fullscreen). It could be particularly usefull for apps like mplayer for example and would prevent hacks like we all have in our config file !

i'm going to have a look into that. if you have a wallpaper - do you have the background-pixmap bug with mplayer, too? if not, what's your workaround.

gorilla wrote:

One thing I like at dwm is the tagging of programs. Would it be a big deal to do this with musca optionally?

what feature would you like to have which tags deliver? there are different things you can achieve with them.

regards,
nem

Last edited by nem (2011-08-14 14:22:52)

Sirsurthur · 2011-08-14 14:29:13

nem wrote:

good day.
Sirsurthur wrote:
Another idea of patch (if you want and have time to) would be a binding mod4+f (for example) to make a frame fullscreen (border off and fullscreen). It could be particularly usefull for apps like mplayer for example and would prevent hacks like we all have in our config file !
i'm going to have a look into that. if you have a wallpaper - do you have the background-pixmap bug with mplayer, too? if not, what's your workaround.

I also have the background-pixmap bug with mplayer and do not have workaround at the moment !

Sirsurthur

mhertz · 2011-08-14 15:34:52

The most important thing imho, which aerosuidae never did gotten developed, is to have a command in the config for opening apps in specific frames/groups, like ratpoison has(atleast for frames).

Currently, we have to use hacks with sleep and move back and fourth and such..

I'm reffering to this, from the musca documentation:

Note that lanuching apps from the startup file is OK, but can be of limited use if you want to do it in more than one group. The exec command runs asynchronously, and if apps are slow to create their windows, they may not necessarily appear in the group you expect. In this case, try launching apps from .xinitrc and just moving them around here.

Second, to have the borders disabled when not having the screen tiled, or alternatively, an option like ratpoison, where if having borders disabled, then a little popup is shortly shown to show which pane is currently focused, whenever switching focus to another pane(aerosuidae also talked about implementing this...).

Personally, I wouldn't like tagging implemented, though...

I'm really glad that you're continuing development of musca, but at the same time, I hope that you keep it lean and small, and think about if the feature-requests you're getting in the feature fits in with the current design of musca..

Thanks again!

nem · 2011-08-14 16:26:35

i'm thinking a lot about the way of applicationmapping to certain frames/groups but still couldn't come up with an overall satisfying solution. what i try to avoid is redundancy - thus new functions should provide meta-functionality (such as mapping them not only to groups but to groups and/or frames chosen by parameters) but also avoid interference with already implemented functionality (and of course it has to fit into musca internal workings). another example is the request for 'focus last focussed' of which i'm still thinking of a way to get done nicely and not restricted to a very specific case.

the function to bring up an empty group (as mentioned in a previous post) is a step in the direction of getting apps spawned in a new group. there's a new muscacommand 'gnew' which spawns a new group and focusses it. then 'hook on ^gnew shell' and 'bind Mod1+b gnew' creates a new group and spawns dmenu to choose an app to launch. if i don't come up with a different method, this is a nice way in the next patch to spawn new apps on new groups without moving them around.
i also strongly consider removing groupnames, since they are somewhat pointless in my opinion (unless someone brings up a good reason to keep them). appmapping will most probably be similar to dwm's method (having an array in config.h with apps->groups, but also providing a .musca_start 'frontend' for it).

so that was some insight in my 'future plans' (none of what i mentioned is implemented in the AUR version yet). i'm not blindly putting stuff in but try to keep the structure of musca coherent and (over time) try to simplify/optimize some stuff. beware that it might take some time to get all of this done. those really are raw ideas of which just a minor part is implemented in a testingstage. i'm not yet familiar with 100% of the musca-structure which also slows the development down besides my small timeframe available to do this. but it's getting there

regards,
nem

edit: actually i just saw, that the muscacommand 'add' provides the 'gnew' functionality already - so if i'm going to drop groupnames you'll be able to simply create a new group with 'add' (which only works with a given new groupname at the moment).

Last edited by nem (2011-08-14 18:59:54)

gorilla · 2011-08-15 08:17:06

nem wrote:

what feature would you like to have which tags deliver? there are different things you can achieve with them.
regards,
nem

Somehow what was discussed in the last posts. I always had some scripts in my .musca_start, so when I opened an app with a keytroke, it opened in my preferred group/frame, but on dwm it is handled via the window_class wich means even when an app is called from a third app or you move around while it opens, it will show up in the preferred group.

nem wrote:

edit: actually i just saw, that the muscacommand 'add' provides the 'gnew' functionality already - so if i'm going to drop groupnames you'll be able to simply create a new group with 'add' (which only works with a given new groupname at the moment).

Have you tried the "use"-command? It creates a new group and switches to it, if this group is already existing, it just switches to it...

PS: I also had a script, which showed me all windows of the current group with one keystroke, so I used musca as a automatic/manual-hybrid-wm... I found it really useful sometimes...

nem · 2011-08-15 16:55:10

a small update in the AUR package. i changed the third patch for 'pad'. it messed up the clients in the frames and also caused an empty frame when closing an app. bad patch before, should be fine now.

gorilla wrote:

Somehow what was discussed in the last posts. I always had some scripts in my .musca_start, so when I opened an app with a keytroke, it opened in my preferred group/frame, but on dwm it is handled via the window_class wich means even when an app is called from a third app or you move around while it opens, it will show up in the preferred group.

yes, that's the appmapping thing. that's the way i had in mind.

gorilla wrote:

Have you tried the "use"-command? It creates a new group and switches to it, if this group is already existing, it just switches to it...

i find it weird, that 'use' and 'add' have nearly the exact same effect. i dropped my 'gnew' change for now and will think a bit more about that.

gorilla wrote:

PS: I also had a script, which showed me all windows of the current group with one keystroke, so I used musca as a automatic/manual-hybrid-wm... I found it really useful sometimes...

i'm not sure i understand what you mean by automatic/manual-hybrid. 'switch window' shows all windows in the same group, too.

regards,
nem

gorilla · 2011-08-16 10:41:57

nem wrote:

i'm not sure i understand what you mean by automatic/manual-hybrid. 'switch window' shows all windows in the same group, too.

Let's say you have only one frame, but ten apps opened... Now you can hit one key and you'll see all windows - each in it's own frame... Like when you change from monocle to tiling view in dwm...

#!/usr/bin/ruby

system "musca -c 'show windows' > ~/.musca/layouts/lines"

FILE = '~/.musca/layouts/lines'
COUNT = `ruby -e 'while gets; end; puts $.' < #{FILE}`
WINDOWS = Integer(COUNT)


def musca_run f
  system "musca -c \"#{f}\""
end


def hmaster
  if WINDOWS == 1
    musca_run "only"
  elsif WINDOWS == 2
    musca_run "load #{Dir.home}/.musca/layouts/2v"
  elsif WINDOWS == 3
    musca_run "load #{Dir.home}/.musca/layouts/3v"
  elsif WINDOWS >= 4
    musca_run "load #{Dir.home}/.musca/layouts/4v"
  end
end

hmaster

(the files in the musca directory are dumped musca-layouts)

Arch Linux

#576 2011-08-09 07:46:06

Re: Musca (Tiling Window Manager)

#577 2011-08-09 18:44:11

Re: Musca (Tiling Window Manager)

#578 2011-08-11 12:22:16

Re: Musca (Tiling Window Manager)

#579 2011-08-11 17:17:18

Re: Musca (Tiling Window Manager)

#580 2011-08-11 17:41:58

Re: Musca (Tiling Window Manager)

#581 2011-08-11 17:52:35

Re: Musca (Tiling Window Manager)

#582 2011-08-11 19:00:19

Re: Musca (Tiling Window Manager)

#583 2011-08-11 19:51:57

Re: Musca (Tiling Window Manager)

#584 2011-08-11 21:09:40

Re: Musca (Tiling Window Manager)

#585 2011-08-12 01:49:52

Re: Musca (Tiling Window Manager)

#586 2011-08-12 11:52:53

Re: Musca (Tiling Window Manager)

#587 2011-08-12 17:02:10

Re: Musca (Tiling Window Manager)

#588 2011-08-13 17:23:37

Re: Musca (Tiling Window Manager)

#589 2011-08-13 22:16:26

Re: Musca (Tiling Window Manager)

#590 2011-08-14 00:13:09

Re: Musca (Tiling Window Manager)

#591 2011-08-14 03:19:06

Re: Musca (Tiling Window Manager)

#592 2011-08-14 09:53:14

Re: Musca (Tiling Window Manager)

#593 2011-08-14 12:55:53

Re: Musca (Tiling Window Manager)

#594 2011-08-14 14:21:39

Re: Musca (Tiling Window Manager)

#595 2011-08-14 14:29:13

Re: Musca (Tiling Window Manager)

#596 2011-08-14 15:34:52

Re: Musca (Tiling Window Manager)

#597 2011-08-14 16:26:35

Re: Musca (Tiling Window Manager)

#598 2011-08-15 08:17:06

Re: Musca (Tiling Window Manager)

#599 2011-08-15 16:55:10

Re: Musca (Tiling Window Manager)

#600 2011-08-16 10:41:57

Re: Musca (Tiling Window Manager)

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