xmonad:
dons@cse.unsw.edu.au (Donald Bruce Stewart) writes:
[...]
In fact, this is really nice! Great work Jason. This is very exciting: it makes some apps (gimp!) a lot more usable.
I agree. Transient frames work nicely. More nicely than with ion3, actually (in ion3 I think there's only one floating layer, so transients were visible in all workspaces which is often irritating).
I agree.
It makes using things like gkrellm possible: I can start it, and then conveniently float it somewhere out of the way. On the other hand, for things like gkrellm, I really *want* that to remain visible when I switch workspaces.
Almost certainly this sets the override-redirect property, and you can thus put it in the status bar gap xmonad allows for.
Maybe there's a place for a per-screen decoration layer, always visible, in which I can stick clocks, status bars, GNOME panels, etc.? Hmm, maybe just things that just display information (rather than interact)? (And then maybe I could use xcompmgr or something to make them translucent?)
clocks, status bars and so on, go in the per-screen `gap', an unmanged region of the screen, on any (or all) borders. xmonad will ignore clients in that area, that have override-redirect set on them. See the status faq, http://xmonad.org/faq.html#status and a recent blog by gimboland, on the topic, http://gimbo.org.uk/blog/2007/05/30/xmonad-does-status-bars-right/
Another (much more trivial) decoration I'd like is the number of the workspace. I guess that could use the per-workspace floating layer. (I imagine that as a translucent number in a corner, but I guess it could equally be opaque. For preference it wouldn't take focus---actually, it would be nice to be able to have some clients not participate in focus---I don't want to type things into gkrellm, for example.)
We plan to dump the internal state of xmonad to stdout, so that you can then post process it with a status bar client. dzen, for example, would happily display the index of the current workspace this way. Expect a patch for this soonish. -- Don