Visible "Stack" (Focus Wheel)
BKLive
really) where the items aren't necessarily "stacked" with the key hook
to move them in and out of focus (exactly dwm), but instead where Alt
+Tab (currently switches tiled layout from vert to horiz in ewm) can
have (optionally?) the effect of moving windows out of the "main"
focus area, possibly making an Alt+Shift+Tab keybinding for this
(since the default Alt+Tab is still useful). The concept is similar to
dwm, except that it's not a default behavior of the wm itself (which
is inherit in their tiling setup).
Imagine you open three terms, move one to a "main" focus on the left
(or right) and the other two stacked in the remaining space. Instead
of using Alt+Tab to move the main window verticle and the other two to
the lower end of the screen, have an Alt+Shift+Tab that moves windows
_not_ in the main area through in somewhat of a focus "wheel". There
would obviously be some issues with allowing this since if you have
two windows it'll just move them back and forth, but I don't see this
as a "problem" result (you hit the keybinding, you must have wanted
this), and further if you have more than 3 windows open (4+) and there
_isn't_ a 'main' focus area, then they will all just move in a
circular fashion (see "focus wheel" analogy) taking on the window
properties of the window to its clockwise location.
What, if any, are your thoughts on this? I see it being useful in a
development setting as you are working from reference material to main
material and don't necessarily want to minimize the reference.
An idea.
BKL
William Diem
My knee-jerk reaction is that this is an interesting idea that sounds
like it would fit very well into scrotwm or something similar, that is
designed around a dwm-type stack/main paradigm.
As to euclid, it seems like there would be two basic (but related) issues:
1) Technical, euclid has no internal concept of a dwm-style stack/main
area. Implementing this would seem to require somehow tacking this
sort of organization onto euclid's native data structures, which
doesn't strike me as being at all a straightforward job.
2) From the user perspective, euclid's interface has no concept of a
dwm stack/main area so how would euclid transition into this mode? Or
if there was no explicit transition into a special static layout mode,
but euclid would just use whatever the current layout happens to be
as-is, no matter how complex or odd the current layout might be, how
should euclid behave? Which is to say, how would euclid determine
which cell to treat as the "main" cell, and perhaps more importantly,
what order it should circle through the windows in?
In a scrotwm or similar, these shouldn't be issues and the focus wheel
idea should fit right in (both to user's expectations, and to the
code). In euclid, it doesn't seem to me that it would fit so
naturally.
To step back for a second, is there a particular problem that euclid
currently has that this is meant to address? Is there a situation you
sometimes find yourself in where euclid's current tools are awkward or
insufficient?
Just my off-the-cuff thoughts.
Cheers,
Will