August 2007 - xmonad - Haskell.org

Remote Controlling XMonad: Cases and Materials
by Andrea Rossato 24 Feb '08

24 Feb '08

Hi, this is a follow up of the thread started by Zed Lopez[1] on controlling XMonad remotely. Stefan O'Rear proposed a solution[2] and I implemented it[3]. We briefly discussed this solution on the #xmonad channel[4] and I thought some more documentation was needed on the methodology to use to achieve the goal. allbery_b reported that such an approach has been used by Mozilla, so I wanted to find more examples to study. Zed said that it was missing this feature from Ratpoison.[5] BTW, the successor of Ratpoison, Stumpwm is developed in Common Lisp...;-) So I went to have a look at how ratpoison deals with the subject and this is what I discovered[7,8]. This is what happens in Ratpoison: a. the Client (that sends the command): 1. creates w simple window 1 pixel width 2. sets an atom (RP_COMMAND) with a command to that window 3. sets an atom (RP_COMMAND_REQUEST) in the root window with XChangeProperty: this atom carries the first window id 4. waits for a propertyNotify to be sent to this window b. Ratpoison: 1. gets the property of the root window (which will return the id of the window containing the command string) 2. searches the window with the command string and executes the command 3. writes an atom (RP_COMMAND_RESULT) to the window with the command result. This will send the propertyNotify the will unblock the client. A similar approach is also used by Enlightment (see src/comms.c) and its remote shell Eesh (see Eesh.xs). WMII, instead, uses libipx and a Plan9 approach (I must confess I don't know much about P9), while DWM has no remote control capability. Now, attached you'll find two archives. The first one is a simple way of running commands from an external program, without a two way communication. It is basically a refactoring of the patch I've already sent[3]. It is simple and effective. I had no problem running it here. The second archive (xrcRatpoisonWay.tar.gz) instead is the ratpoison implementation: I literally copied the algorithm. And there's is a problem. This code produces an X server crash every now and then. I cannot reproduce it and, no matter how many times I read it, I cannot find a bug in my code. I believe there's something wrong with Xlib.Extras.rawGetWindowProperty (a null pointer?). Indeed if you change in ServerMode.hs: let c' = Just [118,105,101,119,49] --c' <- io $ getWindowProperty8 dpy c win no more crashes. You may also see that the command execution sometimes fails. Is that something that used to happen in Ratpoison too? Anyway it is something I think it is worth to investigate a bit more. And I think I will. BTW, these patches require a vary small modification to XMonad itself. XMonad has just to wait for a propertyNotify event sent to the root window. If that happens a hook is called (I named that hook serverHook). I do not want you to equivocate: I'm not pushing for this patch to be included, but I thought to report here some of the information I was able to gather on the subject. Moreover, as far as I can understand, there's is not so much interest in this feature. But here this stuff proved to be quite addictive...;-) Thanks for your kind attention. Andrea [1] see http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/xmonad/2007-July/001502.html [2] see http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/xmonad/2007-July/001509.html [3] see http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/xmonad/2007-July/001533.html [4] see http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/irc/xmonad/2007-07-26.txt [5] http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/ [6] http://www.nongnu.org/stumpwm/ [7] see also http://cvs.savannah.nongnu.org/viewvc/ratpoison/src/communications.c?root=r… [8] see also receive_command() and execute_remote_command() and related comments here: http://cvs.savannah.nongnu.org/viewvc/ratpoison/src/events.c?root=ratpoison… [9] http://search.cpan.org/~rbs/Eesh-0.3/

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Switching away from and back to a tabbed workspace
by Dave Harrison 13 Sep '07

13 Sep '07

Hey all, Not sure if I'm the only one seeing this or not, but what I'm seeing when I have a tabbed workspace, is that if I have >1 tab in the workspace and I switch to another workspace that requires my current workspace be hidden (so not resulting in a swap of two visual workspaces), and then switch back to it, the visual presentation of the tabs is some strange munge of the tab I had selected, and the tab that had been viewing before I chose the currently selected one. This behaviour doesn't seem to show up in the other default layouts that I use such as tiled or full. I'm using the following src checkouts, xmonad David Roundy <droundy(a)darcs.net>**20070820150225] XMonadContrib Spencer Janssen <sjanssen(a)cse.unl.edu>**20070820232834] X11-extras Alec Berryman <alec(a)thened.net>**20070818010619] Cheers Dave

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darcs patch: cleanup in WorkspaceDir.
by David Roundy 05 Sep '07

05 Sep '07

Mon Aug 27 14:58:33 EDT 2007 David Roundy <droundy(a)darcs.net> * cleanup in WorkspaceDir.

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darcs patch: HintedTile.hs: fixes usage info (and 1 more)
by Andrea Rossato 05 Sep '07

05 Sep '07

Hi, I'm sending again with an amended patch to DragPane. This patches are documentation only. Andrea Mon Aug 27 11:40:06 CEST 2007 Andrea Rossato <andrea.rossato(a)unibz.it> * HintedTile.hs: fixes usage info Mon Aug 27 17:29:53 CEST 2007 Andrea Rossato <andrea.rossato(a)unibz.it> * DragPane.hs: fixes usage info

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darcs patch: DragPane.hs: fixes usage info (requires ... (and 2 more)
by Andrea Rossato 05 Sep '07

05 Sep '07

Hi, I'm back... with some patches: the first and the last one are just documentation fixes. For the second one, instead, wait for David's approval since it changes the code to actually use user's supplied colors. Andrea Mon Aug 27 11:28:01 CEST 2007 Andrea Rossato <andrea.rossato(a)unibz.it> * DragPane.hs: fixes usage info (requires exporting handleColor) Mon Aug 27 11:29:02 CEST 2007 Andrea Rossato <andrea.rossato(a)unibz.it> * DragPane.hs: uses user supplied colors Mon Aug 27 11:40:06 CEST 2007 Andrea Rossato <andrea.rossato(a)unibz.it> * HintedTile.hs: fixes usage info

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XMonadContrib.SetWMName: a solution to Java problem
by Ivan Tarasov 05 Sep '07

05 Sep '07

I've done some research into the problem and also contacted the AWT developers. Here is the situation: the low-level AWT code is completely broken and needs big rework. It is unlikely that it gets fixed before JDK7 (and there are no guarantees, because this is formally a low-priority bug: non-reparenting WMs are not officially supported), although AWT developers are trying to improve the situation in background. Recently (in JDK 1.6u1) they added support for Compiz and LG3D WMs which don't do reparenting. Thus it is possible to make Xmonad pretend that it is one of these WMs, and thus workaround the problem. However pretending to be Compiz doesn't help (because of another AWT bug, cf. the insets problem). For LG3D there is a special branch which resets the insets to zero, which happens to be just what we need. Setting WM name to "LG3D" fixes gray-rectangle-instead-of-a-window problem. The patch adds a new XMonadContrib module. One should make a key-binding which executes the (setWMName "LG3D"), which should be used before running Java GUI programs. It is okay to execute this action several times, it takes care not to leak windows. Ivan

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getAtom patch
by Ivan Tarasov 05 Sep '07

05 Sep '07

minor patch: getAtom should be exported from XMonad, so that XMonadContrib modules could reuse it Ivan

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darcs patch: remove LayoutHooks module (which is unus... (and 2 more)
by David Roundy 05 Sep '07

05 Sep '07

Here are three cleanup patches that are to modules that I don't maintain, so they're only to be applied if the maintainer agrees, or you think they're obvious improvements. The removal of LayoutHooks is sort of gratuitous, but a helper module with no users seems highly suspect to me. Also, it may be buggy. I haven't reviewed it, but it does the sort of thing that is tricky to get right. David Thu Aug 23 11:45:20 EDT 2007 David Roundy <droundy(a)darcs.net> * remove LayoutHooks module (which is unused). Thu Aug 23 11:54:05 EDT 2007 David Roundy <droundy(a)darcs.net> * cleanup in ViewPrev. Thu Aug 23 11:54:37 EDT 2007 David Roundy <droundy(a)darcs.net> * cleanup in DwmPromote.

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darcs patch: clean up CopyWindow.
by David Roundy 05 Sep '07

05 Sep '07

This is a cleanup in my CopyWindow module. It simplifies things a bit. David Thu Aug 23 11:59:12 EDT 2007 David Roundy <droundy(a)darcs.net> * clean up CopyWindow.

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darcs patch: CycleWS: a couple of simple functions to cycle between...
by Andrea Rossato 05 Sep '07

05 Sep '07

Hi, I'm resending this patch because of some cosmetic changes: I recently discovered emacs' align-regexp for vertical alignment. It fits perfectly with Haskell code, so I want to use it. But I was too quick and I sent the patch before formatting it..;-) ciao andrea Tue Aug 21 08:11:32 CEST 2007 Andrea Rossato <andrea.rossato(a)unibz.it> * CycleWS: a couple of simple functions to cycle between workspaces

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