Re: Shit-or-rama [Was: mod_xinerama]

On 2008-09-22, Tuomo Valkonen <[email protected]> wrote:
> 20:27 <tuomov> maybe someone can write a shitorama setup that doesn't use 
>                virtual roots
> 20:27 <tuomov> by rewriting the configs
> 20:27 <tuomov> but I don't want to have anything to do with that
> 20:27 <tuomov> and it will also be fucked up, because then float workspaces on 
>                the screens won't be properly separate
> 20:27 <tuomov> it won't emulate separate screens
> 20:28 <tuomov> shit-o-rama is just _shit_
> 20:28 <tuomov> it can't work, it won't work. it's as simple as that.
> 20:28 <tuomov> traditional X multihead offers the correct separate-screen model 
>                for displays that don't merge well
> 20:28 <tuomov> but the dicheads and fuckwits running things, are obsoleting it
> 20:28 <tuomov> and not updating it to reflect new requirements
> 20:29 <tuomov> (such as reparents between screens)

Regarding this, it should be actually quite straightforward to
manually create layouts that are suited to a static area configuration,
provided one is content with workspaces spanning all the areas, and
navigation between the areas possibly being non-geometrical.
Just see cfg_layouts.lua, and modify the mktiling function to
generate separate tilings for the areas, using the geom field, etc.

A module could also dynamically resize/create those tilings, and 
provide a variant WGroupWS that overrides the non-geometrical navigation 
of groups. Independent switching of the tilings displayed in each
area can also be achieved by scripts that just hide/show tilings
from a selection (essentially implementing a non-window-backed
WMPlex), but detecting on which area to change the displayed tiling
gets kludgy, because there's no backing window to receive the event;
intead one has to listen on the root, or on the frames. But if 
there's no frame, you need to kludge with dummy windows for the
focus... 

Having a proper root window is simple and easy; Shit-o-rama makes
things over-complicated. That said, the ideas of I have for Ion4
might be more shit-o-rama -friendly.. if I just ever had time to
work on it.

-- 
Tuomo