Hi all,
A few years ago, for a solid month, I gave up my beloved Openbox for ctwm. Here are some articles: http://troubleshooters.com/linux/ctwm/ My reason was to try to use something EVEN MORE lightweight than Openbox. The benefit I found was configurability beyond my most pie-in-the-sky hopes. After a solid month I went back to Openbox for one and only one reason: The behavior normally associated with Alt+Tab on other window managers, DEs, and Windows UIs. Alt+Tab on Windows, Openbox, Gnome, IceWM, and most other user interfaces works with a stack. The current foreground window is at the top of the stack. You press the Alt key. The first time you simultaneously press Tab, you see a representation of the window second to the top of the stack. Release and press Tab again while still holding Alt, you see the third to top of the stack. Etc. When you finally release the Alt key, the window of the stack item you'd Alt+Tabbed to comes to the top, has focus, and the former top focus window becomes the second to the top of the stack. I dislike Microsoft and Bill Gates, but one thing I have to give them credit for is that in Win95, they sat down hundreds of users for useability tests, listened to those users, and make the Win95 User Interface a marvel of intuition and ease, not just for mouse fans, but for keyboard fans too. I worked a solid month with ctwm's ring based window navigation, performed every workaround I could think of, including assigning separate next and previous on the ring hotkeys, worked day in and day out with it for a solid month, that's hundreds or perhaps over 1000 uses of those keystrokes, and I just couldn't get used to it. I'm a guy who adapts to his machine or software. In my youth I built bicycles out of parts from dumpsters, and if my bicycle constantly steered to the left, within a couple days I didn't notice because I'd compensated for it. I've driven cars with stiff clutches, easy clutches, worn out loose clutches, brand new tight clutches, and no clutches at all (automatic transmission), sputtering engines on the border of stall, crisp engines with get-up-and-go, bouncy suspensions and stiff suspensions, without a problem after a couple days. But some things, like a bicycle, car or skateboard with oscillatory steering, or, more on topic, ring based as opposed to stack based window switching, I could never get used to. Could you please add stack-based Alt+Tab behavior to ctwm? My guess is it would require the following: 1) Detection of both key-down and key-up on mod keys such as Ctrl, Alt, Shift, and Windows. I'm pretty sure that's available from X. 2) A stack. That's trivial: I could code it myself, but connecting it to existing ctwm code would be difficult for me. 3) Whatever facility currently inserts windows into and deletes windows from the ring would also need to do the same thing with the stack. Implementation could be via at_plunge(), at_select(), at_add(), and at_delete() where "at" stands for "Alt+Tab". Naturally, they could be named anything. Here's pseudocode, keeping in mind there'd need to be one stack for each workspace: at_plunge() If not stacks_enabled return If at stack bottom Go to stack top else Go down one level on the stack at_select() If not stacks_enabled return Remove current item from stack Suck down everything above current by 1 Push current item onto top of stack Move window for now-top stack item to foreground Move ring pointer to now-top in ring at_delete() If not stacks_enabled return Remove current item from stack Suck down everything above current by 1 // No need to adjust the ring, other things did that at_add() If not stacks_enabled return Create new stack item for new window If new window intended to have focus Open new window, with focus Push the new stack item else Open new window below all else on workspace Insert new stack item at bottom of stack // No need to adjust the ring, other things did that The beauty of this is it's a tight module easy to plug in without major disruption to any other part of ctwm. It adds an alternative to the window ring, but doesn't replace it. It has a small interface to the existing ctwm: * Every time you add a window to the ring, add it to the stack. The stack is completely separate from the ring. * Every time you delete a window from the ring, delete it from the stack. * Every time you move the ring pointer and display a new window, perform a corresponding at_select() on the stack * Every time you do an at_select(), move the ring pointer to the selected window. * Add at_keycombo more item to .ctwmrc, which also implies stacks_enabled = True (Default is False) The preceding is a mighty thin interface. For the most part, the stacks stand on their own, on the outside of the existing ctwm. Nobody would be required to use the new stacks capability, by default it would be disabled, and I could probably figure out a way to disable it during compile, so even the few ctwm calls to things like at_select() become no-ops if the stacks capability is disabled at compile time. If there's some interest in this, I can write C code implementing the preceding pseudocode, and then somebody with more ctwm knowledge can simply "plug it in." What do you think? Thanks, SteveT Steve Litt Autumn 2020 featured book: Thriving in Tough Times http://www.troubleshooters.com/thrive
