virtual desktops/panel & windowlist

[stephen farrell <stephen farrell org>]

A couple of questions:

1.  The panel is great--but I think a lot of people are going to want
to have a virtual-desktop applet embedded in it.  If I understand
things correctly, such a pager requires direct integration with the
window manager... so how would one accomplish this w/o a standard
window manager for gnome?  I guess one would have to write a different
pager backend for each window manager? (or am I missing something?)

 
2. I read jim pick's ideas about switching between windows much like one
switches between buffers in emacs.  My impression is that this also is
really the domain of the window manager.  E.g., I love iswitch-buffer
in emacs (which allows you to switch between buffers just by typing in
a case-insensitive substring)--a hot key that gave you iswitch-windows
for a desktop would be a great feature I'd love to work on.  Again, if
I understand things correctly, this requires interaction with a window
manager (to get the list of window names and ids??, to execute the
switch to another window ??) that can only be accomplished by some
specific protocol of the window manager over some sort of socket,
shared memory, etc (??). (I've got an X book here--maybe I just need
to take a better look at this stuff in there...)

Thanks!

(btw--something else I'm looking at is an ICS (chess) client for
gnome... I'm looking at porting xboard over to use gtk (and later
adding some nifty features).  Anyone else thinking about or working on
this?)

--

Steve Farrell