Re: [STUMP] Flipping heads in group to groups in head!

[Michael Raskin]

<address@hidden>
<address@hidden>)
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"

>> And we need to rethink bindings for group operations, because when my wish
>> "I want to see group my email client", I would obviously prefer to be able
>> to summon the relevant group in some consistent way, even if my focus is on 
>> another head.
>> 
>> In that case I guess we change quite a lot of things at once (not only in 
>> code,
>> but also conceptually), so the question is what do we want to get if we 
>> change 
>> everything anyway.
>
>Obviously if such a fundamental change is to be made, it should be
>done in a branch on its own and then see if it does work or not.

Well, my point was that it is a good idea to think before doing a branch...

>> Maybe I should not care because I have reached the state where I almost
>> avoid group switches. I have even managed to overcome dirty hack with doing
>> a pseudo-modeline out of XTerm by use of frame tagging (using XTerm is not 
>> a dirty hack per se because I have some status watching sripts for longer 
>> than
>> I use StumpWM and I want seconds in my clock). In some sense, I 
>> have virtual heads inside heads and groups of windows are inside them. (I 
>> will
>> probably post something on this tag-based solution to the list later, I want 
>> to play with it to be sure it works as I intended - if anyone wants to look 
>> at
>> complete beta, I can send this now)
>
>Well, I must say that I too have found many workarounds that end up
>making my dual-head experience pretty smooth and I don't really miss
>independent heads so much anymore.

With tags I try to have at least a semblance of some conceptual system,
not a mere workaround. Whether I succeed is another question.

>The problem is that I don't see anyone volunteering to make such a
>drastic change to the stumpwm codebase. Sabbets or Male are the only
>two contributors to the project that I've ever seen making such huge
>modigications (Male, by the way, wrote most of the current
>Xinerama/multi-head code, and it was no small chore).

Does it have to be a huge rewrite? I don't volunteer because it will not
fit _my_ usage patterns that is well-served by tags; but tags allow to 
have completely different experiences without being a lot of code - this
change should probably be a smaller change.

>Maybe the morale is that the current behaviour is the Stumpwm Way and
>such a fundamental change would belong to a whole new WM? After all,
>stumpwm started as a rewrite of ratpoison, and I've seen several
>people complain of a certain code rot in the stumpwm codebase. Maybe
>it'd be simpler to just start a new WM, having learned of the
>strengths and weaknesses of stumpwm. Of course then the question would
>be: what language next? :)

Until we write next WM in the language that StumpWM becomes, we haven't
succeeded in writing StumpWM in Common Lisp...