Re: iswitchw improvement (icycle)

["Daniel German" <dmg uvic ca>]

On Thu, Aug 7, 2008 at 12:13 PM, Fernando <ferkiwi gmail com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Aug 7, 2008 at 6:47 PM, Daniel M German wrote:
>>
>> I recently started hacking iswitch.
>
> That's great! I had been thinking on that too.
> Some time ago I tried to make the first window matched to be "raised"
> ..trying to have the same behavior that the windows have when cycling by
> sawfish "cycle-" commands.
>

I think iswitch can be nicely extended by providing hooks. But it
requires a bit of reworking
the way the window names are presented and displayed.

>>
>> I find it easier to use than using cycle. But it is not perfect. I'd
>> like it to display the window's icon, but it is not trivial (the way
>> it is implemented).
>
> Yes, I also had a look at that. It uses display-message, I'm not sure but it
> looks like this command is hard coded in C, only showing a string of text.
>

i looked at the way cycle-window shows the icon and it is a lot of
work. We really
need a function that does it all and makes it easy. I think this
should be a priority
because it will open a full range of customizations (like providing a
visualization
of the different workspaces the way compiz does). Drawing the icons on the
screen is painful with the x- related functions, and they are not well
documented
either (they are written in C, I think).

>>
>>  When you have too many windows it a very busy
>> list, where it is difficult to pick up what matters, but regular
>> expressions help a lot, though!
>
> Agree, regexp rocks :P ...however I think it's a pitty that the regexp only
> matches the title of the windows and not the whole line of text displayed
> (it would allow matches by class/workspace/machine/whatever info shown). But
> I think that the way iswitch is implemented makes it a bit hard, so maybe
> your approach is a more feasible option.
>

I have extended it to match the class too. But given the way the functions work
it tries to match windows that match either name or class, but you
can't provide a expression that
tries to match both at the same time.


>>
>> I also forgot, another problem with icycle is that the mouse is
>> disabled. You can only use the keyboard when cycling).
>>
>> --dmg
>
> I don't understand that. How do you want to use the mouse?
>

Because my laptop is a tablet. This is a huge problem with many of sawfish
functionalities. Fortunately the tablet has a set of arrow keys on
tablet mode, so
I can move down the list.

if you want to try it it is here:

http://turingmachine.org/~dmg/temp/dmg-switch-window.jl

I contacted the authors of iswitch but I never got a reply. I renamed
the module name
even those some functions still have the same name.



--dmg