Hi Avi! First off, I should just point out the floating layer is a bit experimental -- nothing's fixed in stone yet, and there's some obvious things that need fixing/tweaking.
I'm having trouble using apps with floating windows. It seems that the only way to move an application to the floating layer is by resizing/moving with the mouse - how do I use keyboard to do this
Right. Currently that is the only way (or for the window to be marked as 'transient'). A naive mod-shift-t that calls 'float' on the window is pretty easy to write, but its not so useful. Really, the window also has to be moved / resized, to be noticeably in the floating layer. Perhaps file a bug report, that there's no way to float a window from the keyboard? Then we'll be forced to rememb^h^h^ addres this before 0.3 comes out in a few weeks.
(how about alt-shift-t, to counteract alt-t, or just toggle with alt-t)? Is there a way to launch an application directly into the floating layer? this would help with applications that open many
Currently no. But there's an open ticket to add filters to the 'manage' function, so you can specify a list of workspaces/layers/actions to do when particular applications open up.
windows. note: with wmii I just need to change focus to the floating layer (even when empty) with alt-space before launching an app (e.g. from dmenu with alt-p, or from an xterm that's already
Hmm. That's an interesting way to think about it. We could certainly have an 'insert' that shifts focus between layers. It would require status bar support, to tag which layer was in focus. I think probably this won't be the default behaviour, but it should be simple enough to write as a contrib module -- after we finsih the StackSet rewrite that is underway to fully support floating layers properly.
floating). I'm pretty clueless about Haskell, so, at the moment, I can only nag about features/questions. I expect this will change soon enough, but until then - please be gentle :-)
Thanks for the feedback! You raise some good issues. Let me just confirm I've summarised them correctly, and the action we'll be taking: 1) floating status should be accesible from the keyboard (will be looked at) 2) certain apps should always be floating (to be added) 3) which apps are floating by default should be configurable (to be added) 4) ponder 'floating layer focus' as a simple way to ensure a window starts floating. (useful idea to look at) So, stay tuned. Most of these we're already looking at, or actively writing code for :-) -- Don