lab 19 - wm

NAME
     lab 19 - understanding wmclient

DESCRIPTION
     In trying to understand wm(1) and its supporting
     libraries wmclient(2), tkclient(2), and titlebar,
     I modified them to resemble (if you squint) rio. I
     haven't adopted rio's menus or button controls.
     Here's a screenshot.

     I began with a copy of wmclient. I wanted to peel
     away the layers between the application and wm. I
     removed the dependency on titlebar and created a
     border that would manage the window. I removed
     whatever else I thought was unneccessary. I ended 
     up with myclient which talks directly to wm. 

     Window management is based on button clicks on the
     border. Button 1 moves , button 2 reshapes, and
     button 3 deletes the window.

     I liked the window management so I wanted to use
     that for all windows. To copy the border changes
     back to wmclient.b was easy.

     But most windows programs in inferno use the
     tkclient. For that I needed to modify the
     titlebar. I created four buttons which fill the
     four edges of the rectangle. Each button is bound
     to the three buttons which control the window
     management.

     I made the color of the borders different for
     tkclients and wmclients. There aren't many
     wmclients: acme and wm.

     The borders  change color when the window gains or
     loses keyboard focus, but it must accept kbd input
     for this to happen.

     wmclient creates a new window with a transparent
     image, so it's filled with whatever is beneath it.
     This leads to an obvious tool grab to capture and
     image of a part of the desktop. Reshape the window
     to grab the part of the picture then click button
     1 in the image and it writes it to the file named
     on the command line to grab.


CONCLUSION
     I like the results. I'll probably use this going
     forward and see what other mouse bindings I like.
     But this leads me to modify the tk for commands
     like sh etc., tweaking everything.

     For some reason wm/sh calls a Tk command which
     refers back to the titlebar assuming the .Wm_title
     exists. So I included a modified wm/sh.

     I'm tempted to make more mods to wm/sh to remove
     the menus and make it more like and acme window,
     that is, middle click sends, which is really the
     only menu option I ever use.

FILES
     grab.b myclient.b sh.b titlebar.b titlebar.m

     tkclient.b wmclient.b mkfile

Comments

Anonymous said…
This looks really cool! Please, send it to vita; I complained about wm to them some time ago and they said they would be interested if someone did a rio-like hack for wm; maybe not as the default config; but as an option.

Great work, I will try to take a look at the code when I have some time; but I like the look of it.

uriel
saoret.one said…
just tried, and i like it. only thing i'm missing is the hability to raise/lower the windows with a double click with the left button.which the default wm/wm has.

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