Re: reviving sawfish development.

[Scott Scriven <sawfish-list toykeeper net>]

* Janek Kozicki <janek_listy wp pl> wrote:
> 2. There was an attempt to add support for tabs in sawfish by writing a
>    plugin. This attempt was so-so succesfull, because the author said
>    that sawfish simply does not support tabs, and his plugin is a
>    workaround around sawfish limitations using some lisp hacking.
>
> The most promising thing for me (as a user) is that Ian Zimmerman
> declared to work on the first two points (IIRC he is more interested
> in the second one, currently).

Yes!

I'm very, very interested in this feature.  I took Yann Hodique's
tab code and made some small improvements, created a
tab-compatible theme, and have been using it happily for a couple
years.  The files are available here:

  http://toykeeper.net/sawfish/

It works well enough for my use, but it sure isn't as slick or
polished as the tab features in fluxbox, pwm, or other similar
window managers.

I'm not terribly familiar with rep, or with sawfish's internals,
so I've had a difficult time implementing fairly simple things.

I could provide a pretty big todo list pointing out all the
shortcomings in my tabbed windowing, in case anyone has the urge
to help.  :)

> 3. when sawfish is restarted all windows lose their position and
>    mainly move to the current viewport or the first viewport. But some
>    even move outside the desktop limits to some random position.
>    (using xinerama, if that matters)

In my experience, windows resume their old positions and desktops
when sawfish restarts, except for a few specific apps (xv).
However, all the tab grouping is lost, along with per-window
border styles, and occasionally the size (partially-maximized
windows become fully maximized).  IIRC, some other states get
lost too, like "ignored" status.

> > But if someone wants to create an active branch in the  
> > gnome svn repository and work on it, that's fine with me.
> 
> Yes! That's the spirit. Create a branch, and allow him to work there.
> We better avoid making a fork in separate repository, becaue this may
> lead to too much fragmentation and additional problems with merging.

FWIW, branching is a bit easier in distributed SCM systems, such
as Mercurial.  It's a minor detail, though.

> > extra functionality should be added as lisp extensions
> > outside the  core project.
> 
> except tabs support. It is missing in the sawfish core. Uhh,
> and xgl too ;)

I get the impression that tabs could be done entirely in rep.
It's a pretty high-level concept, unlike X composite support.


-- Scott