Comment #17 on issue 19 by amdragon: Investigate a way to allow contrib extensions to use compositing. http://code.google.com/p/xmonad/issues/detail?id=19

The advantage of handleEventHook is that you also receive events that would otherwise be handled by xmonad.

Ah, that makes sense. I suppose it doesn't help much in the compositing case because I don't think those messages are caught by xmonad, but I can see it being useful for other things.

I don't know what you mean by actions not having a way to receive Events

I didn't mean to say it was impossible to receive Events from actions, just difficult. From a user's perspective, all you want to do is bind the action to a key and be done with it. But this doesn't work. 1) Instead of implementing your action as an action, you can implement it as a layout modifier (ala XMonad.Hooks.EventHook). Now your action is a layout, which is weird, and the user has to both bind the action to a key and, for some mysterious reason, wrap their layout hook. 2) Using handleEventHook, you can implement your action as an action, plus an event hook. If you're handling events you almost certainly also need state, which means you also need something to create the IORef. Now the user has to "create" the action, bind it to a key, /and/ modify their handleEventHook. 3) You can have your own event loop (ala XMonad.Prompt). Now your action is just an action and the user can just bind it to a key like they wanted, but you don't play well with others. At best, you delay messages, which could be bad if its a damage or timer event aimed at another event handler trying to do compositing or animation. At worst you eat them. Ever noticed what happens to XMonad.Layout.Decoration's that are under an XMonad.Prompt or its completions window? The prompt eats expose events, so the title bars get wiped out and stay wiped out after the prompt closes. Again, imagine if you were eating damage or timer events. Anyways. This is mostly intended as food for thought: things that are going to come up if/when someone starts working on compositing. -- You received this message because you are listed in the owner or CC fields of this issue, or because you starred this issue. You may adjust your issue notification preferences at: http://code.google.com/hosting/settings