Re: RFC: ctwm enhancement for multiple monitors

Le 08/04/2023 à 18:03, Quentin Barnes a écrit :
> 
> I'm happy to see the recent ctwm changes with xrandr support!
> 
> To take better advantage of those changes, I'd like some info about
> the monitors to be available when processing my ".ctwmrc" file.
> 
> I tried hacking what I could via esyscmd()s that would route the
> output of the xrandr command through awk to squeeze out what I
> needed, but that was clumsy and rather painful at best.  Then I
> thought that maybe I could just mod ctwm itself to provide that info
> via m4 macros, so I went a hacking.
> 
> So far those mods have been working out fine for me, and I'd like
> to see if anyone has any comments on them.
> 
> My problem is I have a laptop that at any given time may be
> connected to 0-2 external monitors which may use different graphical
> dongles of varying resolutions (anything from 1024x768 to 4K)
> depending on the site, meeting room, dock, etc.
> 
> What I was missing the most are two things: the resolutions of the
> various monitors so that I could do some scaling in my ".ctwmrc",
> and the names of the monitors so I could specify them in the xrandr
> extended geometries.  Since the resolutions and names change often
> for me, I can't just hardcode them.
> 
> I created a commit with my changes for comment here:
> https://github.com/qbarnes/ctwm-mirror/commit/aa2148e20b5ef117c2d501fda5c07b4e3f96c610
> (If you try out the change yourself, be sure to pick up the earlier
> commit 1240941 that adds the function RLayoutGetNameIndex().)

Hi,

Good idea, I just commented your last commit.

> 
> In the macro that is "MONITOR__<name>", it's got the double-underbar
> to prevent a possible name collision with "MONITOR_<number>".  If
> there is absolutely no chance a device ever being a simple integer
> now or in the future, then the extra underbar can be removed.

I think there is no chance a collision occurs, as Xrandr should take 
care of this.

> 
> All the new macros are simple except for "MONITOR__<name>".  Because
> device names can have some special characters, I'd recommend to
> always use indir() when expanding it.
> 
> I have a question about the order of devices returned by xrandr.
> I didn't know if it can be assumed that first listed device will
> _always_ be the primary device.  It seems that way, but I didn't
> know if that was guaranteed.  Does anyone know?
> 
> What do people think of this change overall?  Was what it something
> that makes sense and might be useful to others?  Is there a better
> or different way to do what I need to do instead?

Out of curiosity, do you have some examples of use of these new macros?

> 
> (BTW, I've been using ctwm as my primary and daily X11 window
> manager since its first release 30 years ago.)
> 

Same here :)

++

Max.