kerravonsen | Status report

Recent software exploration:

After using Ion happily for however long, having changed over all my computers to using it for my window manager (laptop, desktop, work) I found some disquieting behaviour on my desktop -- it kept on running out of xclient space. Since the only X-related thing I'd changed was using Ion, the blame, I am putting there. Since I have been so much enjoying using a tiled, tabbed window manager, I didn't want to back to a traditional "floating" window manager, but I couldn't go on with Ion, not the way it was messing things up. (Mind, it was behaving perfectly nicely on the other two computers). So I thought I'd take another look at wmi, this time reading all the documentation first, not just the main man page. I'd say that Ion is more stable, but wmi has more features; though there are also features of Ion that wmi doesn't have (yet) that it needs (such as a working "dock"), but wmi development seems to be fairly fast.

Like Ion, wmi has tiled and tabbed windows, though it deals with the tiling slightly differently -- while Ion has frames which then get filled with windows, wmi requires the windows first, and allows frame-splitting when there are at least two windows in the same frame. It also differs from Ion in the way that it handles floating windows; Ion uses special workspaces for floating windows, but wmi manages to mix floating and tiled windows on the same workspace by the clever method of redefining what "maximized" means: if a window is "maximized" it becomes tiled, if it isn't maximized, it's floating.

Another nice feature of wmi is the status bar at the bottom. It only takes up as much height as a normal titlebar, and has two "modes". In normal mode, it's in three sections: first, it lists all the workspace names, so you can jump to them with a click if you want (and it helps giving them meaningful names, it makes them easier to keep track of). The middle section is where the "iconised" (otherwise known as "detached") windows go, and the right hand section is the "status" section, which normally just has "window manager improved" written in it, but one can set up a command to put whatever text there that you want, and an example script which puts the date and time there in a loop. Then, when the status bar is in "command mode", it gives you a list of wmi commands that you can chose from, with auto command completion. This basically means that both Ion and wmi are nicely scriptable, which is a pretty amazing concept when you think about it. Then again, Fvwm is also fairly scriptable, if you dig into modules like FvwmPerl.

I am looking forward to the next snapshot release of wmi, as it supposedly will now compile on Solaris, which means I'll be able to use it at work. It is a much nicer working environment if one is using the same window manager on all one's computers.

I have made a "gold" theme for wmi, and intend to do a "peacock" one (green and blue).

Recent reading:
- just finished "Valkyries" by Jerri Massi
- just finished "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams
- now reading "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe" by Douglas Adams
- should be reading Hosea for biblestudy

Currently writing:
- wrote almost 200 words of my multiverse2004 story - yay
- discussing a collaboration with reveilles
- added expansion of "The Other Side of the Glass" to my todo list
- lizbee is responsible for the following phrase sticking in my brain and demanding to be used as a theme for something: "implacable kindness". Because that's how The Squid was.