Re: [Notion-general] Panels with notion?

[Arnout E. <no...@bz...>]

On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 08:44:49PM +0100, David Given wrote:
> F9 asks for the workspace type. 

Right: choosing the 'empty' workspace layout gets you a floating ws.

> I have, however, found Tiling->Untile and Context->New Tiling which convert 
> to and from floating mode respectively.

OK

> What I really want is a tiled workspace, over which windows appear
> floating by default (unless the user has previously specified a rule, or
> manually drops a window into a frame).

Aha, yes.

> Looking at the way defwinprops work, it appears as though the first
> defwinprop that matches is used; that is, settings don't stack. 

Indeed they don't stack. I updated the 'Winprops' section of the notionconf
document to better describe the matching algorithm - see
http://notion.sourceforge.net/notionconf/node4.html#SECTION00450000000000000000

Documentation improvement suggestions/patches are certainly welcome :).

> >> I did spend some time fiddling with mod_dock but there's no documentation 
> >> for that either. I think I did manage to get it to swallow a panel once 
> >> but it then expanded to fill 2/3 of the screen...
> 
> I found out why this happened: the dock swallowed the top-bar (which is
> one screen wide), then the gkrellm (which is 2/3 of a screen high), then
> the bottom-bar (which is one screen wide). So the dock ended up being
> about two screens wide and 2/3 of a screen high, with only the top-bar
> visible.

Jep, that sounds entirely plausible.

> [...]
> > The sf.net trackers, https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=314802
> 
> Okay, I've done that here.
> 
> https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=3426524&group_id=314802&atid=1324531
>
> I've labelled it 'EMWH compliance' because, hey, I can dream...

I share your dream :). Might be good to have a seperate issue per feature
though, so we can keep discussions somewhat focussed.

> >> (I'm also wondering whether the defwinprop stuff is flexible enough to 
> >> support this without needing any core changes.)
> > 
> > I'm not sure.
> 
> It's not --- it can only match on class, role and instance.
> 
> A more sophisticated matching engine would certainly be possible, but
> given all this is Lua, maybe something like:
> 
> defwinprop {
>   predicate = function(w)
>     return w._NET_WINDOW_TYPE == "_NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE_DOCK"
>   end,
> 
>   floating = true -- or something
> }
> 
> ...would be possible? 

In fact, specifying a custom predicate is already possible, it was just not 
documented :(. You can override the 'match' function, for example like this:

defwinprop {
   class = "Npviewer.bin",
   match = function(prop, cwin, id)
              return is_fullscreen(cwin)
           end,
   switchto = false,
   flash_fullscreen = true,
}

To read client window properties from lua, use ioncore.x_get_window_property
(http://notion.sourceforge.net/notionconf/node7.html#fn:ioncore.x_get_window_property)
and check out the atom-related functions.

To get your desired behavior of having all windows float by default, I'm not 
sure I know of an elegant way to do that right now. Indeed having all matching
winprops 'stack' their options seems like a neat idea, but it might have quite
a bit of impace - we should carefully consider it.


Kind regards,

Arnout