I've had a desire for some time for an improved syntax for matching
windows using the Style, Next, Current, etc. commands.
Right now, I can say:
Next ("xterm") Focus
I can even use wildcards:
Next ("*term*") Focus
This is all well and good when your terminal windows all have "term"
somewhere in their name/iconname/class/resource.
However, I have a few applications that give terminal windows:
Powershell
Konsole
xterm
gnome-terminal
There isn't one wildcard expression that will capture all of those.
Add to this the ability of some applications to change their window
title due to state (xterm has an escape sequence that most terminal
windows accept, Netscape is another application that comes to mind
that does this), and it gets difficult to map a "hot key" that will
traverse through a related set of windows.
Do you think it might be a good time now to add some functionality to
the window matching feature to allow for alternates and/or more
specific matching?
My thought is that we could create "conditions" in a way similar to
that of Functions, Menus, Decors, etc:
DestroyCondition "ConditionName"
AddToCondition "ConditionName"
+ ConditionTerm ConditionPhrase
+ ConditionTerm ConditionPhrase
Each condition line is parsed one at a time. At first, the condition
will select no windows, and each successive line will narrow or widen
the windows selected.
ConditionTerm may be:
All Select all windows
Widen Term Add to the selected windows those that match
the Term (boolean OR)
Narrow Term Restrict the currently selected windows to
those that match the ConditionPhrase (boolean
AND)
Term may be one of the following:
WindowName="xxx" Wildcard match on window name
IconName="xxx" Wildcard match on icon name
Resource="xxx" Wildcard match on resource name
Class="xxx" Wildcard match on window class
Match="xxx" Wildcard match on title, icon, resource, or class
CirculateHit Override CirculateSkip Style attribute
CirculateHitIcon Override CirculateSkipIcon Style attribute
CirculateHitShaded Override CirculateSkipshaded Style attribute
CurrentDesk All windows on current desktop
CurrentPage All windows on current page and desktop
CurrentPageAnyDesk All windows on current page on any desktop
Iconic All windows that are iconified
Layer[=n] All windows on layer "n" (defaults to layer of
currently focused window)
Maximized All maximized windows
PlacedByButton3 True if last interative move ended with button 3
Raised All windows that are raised
Shaded All shaded windows
Sticky All sticky windows
Transient All transient windows
Visible All windows that are visible
Any Term can be negated by prefixing with "!":
+ Narrow !WindowName="*Netscape*"
This would narrow the selection to windows that do NOT have "Netscape"
within their window names.
The Syntax to use these conditions could be something like:
DestroyCondition "Terminal"
AddToCondition "Terminal"
+ Widen Resource="XTerm" # xterm
+ Widen Resource="Powershell" # powershell
+ Widen Resource="Konsole" # konsole
+ Widen Resource="Terminal" # gnome-terminal
DestroyFunc "CycleTerminals"
AddToFunc "CycleTerminals" \
"I" Next (Condition=Terminal) Focus
+ "I" None (Condition=Terminal) Exec powershell
This example would cycle through all my terminal windows or, if no
terminal window was found, would spawn a new powershell.
DestroyFunc "IconifyTerminals"
AddToFunc "IconifyTerminals" \
"I" All (Condition=Terminal) Iconify 1
This example also seems to be able to produce the If/Then/Else logic
that has been discussed on this list (although there may be hidden
caveats here!).
Not only is this useful for cycling through windows, but it can be
used to group Style attributes to a common set of windows:
Style Condition=Terminal some-special-styles-for-term-windows
I've been sitting on this idea for a while (ever since 2.3 was
originally announced to be in "feature freeze" quite a while ago), and
figured that this might be a good time to make this suggestion.
--
Larry Gensch [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Working for COMPAQ for over a twentieth of a century
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