Hi Sergey, On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 07:41:54PM -0600, Sergey Manucharian wrote:

I have just installed Cellwriter in my Arch Linux box to see how it actually works.

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I can't seem to get Cellwriter (a handwriting recognition input panel) to work with XMonad, whereas it works fine under other window managers. It's not exactly true. It does not work under TWM too. But it works with XFCE. Haven't check others though.

Yes, I should have been clearer: by "it works under other window managers", I meant "under some other window managers" rather than "under all". As far as I remember, I've previously had Cellwriter working under Enlightenment and Compiz. (Presumably it works under Gnome and KDE, since Cellwriter available in a number of distributions, but I haven't personally tested that.)

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When I enter letters in Cellwriter and hit the "Enter" button, the input doesn't seem to go anywhere. As I could figure out, the output is supposed to go to the ACTVIVE (focused) window. When you use it with Xmonad, the Cellwriter's window is focused all the time! In e.g. XFCE the Cellwriter's window is never becomes active - focus is at the previous one, and you can move the mouse around to make different windows to become active and accept the Cellwriter's output.

Yes, that sounds about right. At the back of my mind, I've always vaguely wondered how Cellwriter manages to accept input without grabbing the focus, but not knowing much about low-level X windows programming I never tried to figure it out.

But I really do not know how to overcome such a behaviour. The same problem will arise with any virtual on-screen keyboard.

I wonder how it works in other window managers? Or rather, what does Cellwriter do to avoid becoming the active window in window managers such as XFCE or Enlightenment?

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The only Cellwriter-related config I've put in my xmonad.hs is to always float it By the way, for me it floats without any config...

You're right, it floats for me too without any config. Toby -- Dr T. S. Cubitt Quantum Information Theory group Department of Mathematics University of Bristol United Kingdom email: tsc25@cantab.net web: www.dr-qubit.org

On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 12:38:24AM -0400, wagnerdm@seas.upenn.edu wrote:

Quoting Toby Cubitt :

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When I enter letters in Cellwriter and hit the "Enter" button, the input doesn't seem to go anywhere. As I could figure out, the output is supposed to go to the ACTVIVE (focused) window. When you use it with Xmonad, the Cellwriter's window is focused all the time! In e.g. XFCE the Cellwriter's window is never Yes, that sounds about right. At the back of my mind, I've always vaguely wondered how Cellwriter manages to accept input without grabbing the focus, but not knowing much about low-level X windows programming I never tried to figure it out.

What happens if, rather than doFloat, you doIgnore to prevent xmonad from managing that window?

Genius! With doIgnore, Cellwriter never gets the focus, but still accepts input, and the result goes to the active window as desired. There's a very slight niggle, in that it becomes impossible to quit Cellwriter using standard key bindings. But presumably that's what the command-line option "cellwriter --hide-window" is for, and I can easily use that to get things working the way I like. Thanks very much! Toby -- Dr T. S. Cubitt Quantum Information Theory group Department of Mathematics University of Bristol United Kingdom email: tsc25@cantab.net web: www.dr-qubit.org