Hi Yaakov! On Thu, Sep 03, 2009 at 10:28:10PM +0200, Yaakov Nemoy wrote:

Hey Jan,

2009/9/3 Jan Vornberger :

...

Hello list!

Here we go now, the 'official' announcement of Bluetile: A modern tiling window manager with a gentle learning curve. As noted before, it is the result of my school project I presented a while ago (http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.xmonad/7458/). Here is a brief description of Bluetile:

Congratulations!

<snip>

A packaging question. The original xmonad uses xmessage for compile errors. Do you still depend on this in any way?

The code that calls xmessage on compile errors is still there. But since Bluetile does not support any kind of recompilation I don't see how this code path could ever be triggered. And I don't use it anywhere else. So no, xmessage is not needed for Bluetile. Regards, Jan

Hi Joachim! On Fri, Sep 04, 2009 at 04:43:33PM +0200, Joachim Breitner wrote:

Am Donnerstag, den 03.09.2009, 20:02 +0200 schrieb Jan Vornberger:

...

Here we go now, the 'official' announcement of Bluetile: A modern tiling window manager with a gentle learning curve.

this might be something that should be shipped by Debian. Do you already know of some users of bluetile on Debian that would benefit from such a package?

I know from a few users that would be much more likely to try Bluetile if it were available as a package for Debian. On that note, thx a lot for your xmonad packages! I'm a Debian user myself, and while I had heard of xmonad before, it wasn't until it entered Debian testing that I installed it and started using it. Thank you! :-)

Ah, ok, there is the answer :-). Jan, please make sure you ping me once it’s possible to build bluetile against the released versions of xmonad and xmonad-core.

Will do. However, it will probably be some time until then. I have a feeling, that some of my patches will be controversial here on xmonad's mailing list. :-) But we shall see. :-) Cheers, Jan

On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 02:08:22AM -0400, Kyle Murphy wrote:

If you don't think it's straying too far off topic, or too time consuming would it be possible to get a brief summary of the kinds of changes you needed to make to xmonad? I'm particularly intrigued by those title bars you have on the windows as it would be nice to get something like that on floating windows or in certain kinds of layouts with plain vanilla xmonad (and yes, I'm aware of the tab bars).

Unfortunately the decoration is the one part, which right now isn't very modular at all. So if you would use Bluetile's decoration, it would probably pull in a bunch of stuff that you may or may not actually want. But what kind of decoration are you looking for? Do you also want those 'buttons' for minimizing, maximizing and closing? Because then, obviously, you would also need the layout modifiers that minimize and maximize. Or do you only want the decoration without those buttons? Then it's not much different from what is currently in XMC.Layout.Decoration (expect for a bunch of improvements to make decoration work better in a dual-head setup. I don't know if you have such a setup?) One more thing: This won't work on floating windows. The decoration is a layout modifier, so will only affect windows that are managed by a layout (which floating windows aren't). Those 'floating windows' you see on Bluetile's screenshots is the effect of an extra floating/stacking layout. Bluetile discourages the use of the floating layer and instead provides this extra layout. It's a little bit like XMC.Layout.SimpleFloat but much improved - again especially for dual-head setups - but requires a modification to xmonad core (the PositionStore). Regards! Jan

On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 08:47:07PM +0100, Toby Cubitt wrote:

What's particularly beautiful to me about Bluetile is the way windows can be moved and resized using only the mouse, both when tiled and when "floating". Xmonad seems to be designed to cater for keyboard-only use, and the support for that is fantastic. But I use Xmonad on a tablet PC, so mouse-only use is also important to me. Currently Xmonad isn't so great for the latter.

I'd love to see these parts of Bluetile make it into Xmonad or Xmonad-contrib. How easy would that be to do? I guess for starters it would need your extra floating/stacking layout...

Those are definitely things that are useful on their own. The floating layout is called PositionStoreFloat but needs some modification to the core. For the tiled cases, I wrote MouseResizableTile which is basically a version of XMC.Layout.ResizableTile that can also be resized with the mouse. That one should actually be pretty straightforward to use with xmonad. To switch windows with the mouse, there is a WindowSwitcher decoration. It needs the big blob of decoration code, that hopefully can be modularized a little bit more. I'm working on it. :-) Regards, Jan

On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 09:32:31AM -0700, Don Stewart wrote:

Jan.Vornberger:

...

I'm working on it. :-)

What does the xmonad team need to do to help you merge this wonderful code in?

For now I'm good working on it on my own, it'll just take some time. But if it's too much and I need help, I'll ask. Thx for the offer! Cheers, Jan

Hi! On Sun, Sep 06, 2009 at 03:15:55PM +0200, Olivier Schwander wrote:

Hi,

Le 03 Sep 2009 20:02, Jan Vornberger a écrit:

...

* Maximizing & minimizing windows in all layouts

It may be a dumb question, but is there a way to use the GNOME window decorator to draw windows border and titlebar ? I just had a look at the screenshot and I feel it may have a better look with such a decoration ?

I agree, it would be really nice to be able to use the GNOME/Metacity window decorator. I don't know if there is an easy way to do this. I did look into using the window decorator of Compiz. They seperated the decoration part into an extra manager, that talks with the core application. That way it's easy to write different decoration manager and they can use stuff like the GTK toolkit, without having that dependency in Compiz itself. So I figured, it might be possible to reuse those decoration managers with Bluetile. There isn't too much documentation, how exactly it works, but this is what I gathered (mostly from these two posts: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/compiz/2006-April/000009.html and http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/compiz/2007-April/001935.html): Compiz creates input-only frame windows around all real windows and sets a property on them. The decoration manager finds those frame windows by the property and creates pixmaps that contain the decoration. Those are then somehow communicated back to the window manager and can be drawn. There are some libraries (libdecoration, libwnck) to help with some off this stuff. Unfortunately it was beyond my skills with X11 programming and interfacing with C applications from Haskell to do this in the time I had. There might be other problems as well, I'm not sure. It would be a nice feature though, I agree.

...

* Designed to integrate with the GNOME desktop environment

By saying that, you are okay to depend on GNOME features, aren't you ?

I guess so - do you have anything particular in mind? I guess 'integrated' is a little too much to say here. I think it's still fairly desktop environment agnostic, but I only tested it with GNOME, so that's why I mention it. The only 'integration' is, that some Metacity keyboard shortcuts are available and gnome-terminal is the default terminal (but if that is not available, it falls back to xterm). Regards! Jan

On Sun, Sep 20, 2009 at 02:10:25PM +0200, Jan Vornberger wrote:

Hi there!

Just wanted to let you know, that I created a short screencast showing some of Bluetile's features. If you are curious about Bluetile, but don't want to install it, this should give you a good overview! :-)

http://vimeo.com/6661713

Beautiful! -Brent