Life, universe, and ION3
Hi all! Some week ago i read about ION window-manager at the Hungarian Unix Portal. Due, I'm an engineering monkey, and i really hates wasting my time playing with the windows locations, i thought the tiling wm would be a good thing for me. So, i pulled down the ION2 from the Debian respository and give it a shot. My first thoughts: Simple, efficient and fast. After that, i dowloaded the ION3 source, and compiled it. Well, it's a bit different from the Debian's ION2, but the development is clear. The Run menu file listing is damned fast comapared to the GTK+ same function. I'm still testing it, but i can't find any bug, yet. Also i have some ideas and thoughts, which i compiled to kind of whistlist. Most is not a basic wm feature, but it would be nice in a tabbed, tiling wm. Maybe some of these already developed, but spending 13 hours with the soldering iron, and 3 hours moving bricks every day, leaves me a small time to reading the documentations. Requested features: Policy settings for the new window creation. When i run some multyple window application (mplayer, gimp), it would be nice if i could set where must the spawned window must to be placed. Currently it's follows the mouse pointer. My idea is to be set a policy for every application (tabs) for the method of the new window placement. Three or four rules (same tile, some tile, any tile, float) would be suffice. Auto size adjust for the fixed size applications at start. If i run some application like gkrellm, xmms, it would be nice, if the tile size automatically set, when it's start. Switching the application to full screen mode, and back to the previous tile settings. Some applications like the IDEs, database managers, CADs requires full screen and split screen mode in the working process (for example: routing the PCB with the layout editor and checking the schematic at the same time. Usually it's a constant switching between the splited [picking and placing a part] and fullscreen mode [routing the part's net]) Mouse aided tile resize. User experiences: These are some ideas for applications, which increasing the user base of the ION. I know, these are not necessary for a successfull wm, but usually these tools, which is mostly affect the user feels. GUI based configuration tool for the keybindings. Support for alternate keybindings. The basic ION keybindings is disaster using with Midnight Commander or Gentoo file managers. Both of these heavily depends on the funtion keys. Also the most CADs heavily depends on the function keys. Icon based, floating style application launcher. Happy hacking! Mark Balogh HUNGARY
Re: Life, universe, and ION3
On 2007-10-09, ,,, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Also i have some ideas and thoughts, which i compiled to kind of whistlist. Most is not a basic wm feature, but it would be nice in a tabbed, tiling wm. Maybe some of these already developed, but spending 13 hours with the soldering iron, and 3 hours moving bricks every day, leaves me a small time to reading the documentations. As mentioned in another post, I'm unlikely to be writing any new stuff for Ion in the next handful of years, if ever. It's time for something else, and GNU/Linux (and consequently *BSD as well to a slightly lesser extent) is turning into such a clusterfuck idiot box, that I doubt there's anything semi-usable to run Ion on after I'm ready to start working on Ion4... aside from maybe Windows. Nevertheless, I'm likely to put up an 'Ion3plus' repository after the stable Ion3 is released, where users can contribute code moderated/edited by me, the malevolent dictator -- or rather, editor. (A project with an editor that does his job is like a journal with a good editor, whereas a truly bazaarian software project is like writings on the toilet wall -- or the typical wiki.) Policy settings for the new window creation. When i run some multyple window application (mplayer, gimp), it would be nice if i could set where must the spawned window must to be placed. Currently it's follows the mouse pointer. My idea is to be set a policy for every application (tabs) for the method of the new window placement. Three or four rules (same tile, some tile, any tile, float) would be suffice. This is something of a FAQ. You can set somewhat rigid policies by the winprops mechanism, as indicated in another post. I'd like the default to be to place the windows in the frame they were created from, but this requires application support. It should be doable by writing a support module for the (typically ultra-complicated) FDO startup spec, which I couldn't be arsed to do, but few applications that matter actually support it. So in lack of that, placing windows in the current window is the policy of least surprise. Auto size adjust for the fixed size applications at start. If i run some application like gkrellm, xmms, it would be nice, if the tile size automatically set, when it's start. Maybe you can write a script to do so. I don't like it. Ion-friendly applications should behave as if they were full-screen (single-document) programs, adjusting to the size of their virtual screen -- the Ion frame. For some smaller monitor sort of applications I did once think of writing a support for so-called trays (nothing to do with the tiny system tray icons), but couldn't be arsed. Switching the application to full screen mode, and back to the previous tile settings. Umm... Mod1+Enter is a toggle, or what do you mean? Mouse aided tile resize. You can resize with the rat. GUI based configuration tool for the keybindings. But not WIMP-GUI, please. Rather, curses. Support for alternate keybindings. It's configurable. Icon based, floating style application launcher. Yuck. Well, for a touch screen kiosk sort of thing, a sort of sidebar application launcher could be nice... -- Tuomo
Re: Life, universe, and ION3
On 2007-10-09, Sylvain Abélard [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Sorry if my advice seems outdated, I've been Windows-imprisoned for a long time. At least there's _still_ that choice to the OSDL-sponsored hegemony. (I'm beginning to think OSDL and its member companies are more harmful to software choice than Microsoft, by sponsoring projects that turn Linux, and *nix userland in general, into an idiot box clusterfuck.) -- Tuomo
Re: Life, universe, and ION3
On 2007-10-09, Sylvain Abélard [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Provided you bear with monoculture and software locks, why not. Sounds like where FOSS is heading. DotNet begins to show many cool stuff for developers, but still the intended user is expected to be another brainless WIMP-tard. DotNet is YAMMHBE (Yet Another Megalomaniac Modernist Bureaucracy and Hierarchy of Everything). -- Tuomo
Re: Life, universe, and ION3
On 10/9/07, Tuomo Valkonen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 2007-10-09, Sylvain Abélard [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Provided you bear with monoculture and software locks, why not. Sounds like where FOSS is heading. You don't find heroic Tuomo Valkonen's making your Windows usable. Yet. DotNet is YAMMHBE But F# and the recent DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime) looks really sexy ! -- Sylvain Abelard, Railer Rubyist. Epita MTI 2008.
Re: Life, universe, and ION3
On 2007-10-09, Sylvain Abélard [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: But F# and the recent DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime) looks really sexy ! Many languages themselves aren't that bad (Nemerle is another interesting DotNet language), but the libraries and library frameworks around them, designed by inferior minds, tend to suffer from megalomaniac hierarchies (Haskell is another example) as well as OO fetish these days. -- Tuomo
Re: Life, universe, and ION3
On 2007-10-09 14:47 +0100, Sam Mason wrote: I hope the inferior minds comment below was intended as a joke -- Not really. Not everyone is up to the task of designing a programming language, and certainly not a beautiful and useful one (certainly not the C++ designers!), whereas it is comparatively easy to write a crappy library up to a specification of what it must provide access to. Designing a beautiful library -- now that takes effort again. On Tue, Oct 09, 2007 at 12:48:58PM +, Tuomo Valkonen wrote: What makes these libraries/frameworks inferior, rather than just different and/or unsuitable for solving the problems you're (currently) interested in? I'm not saying unsuitable, I'm saying they suck aesthetically. Good programming is art, science, and engineering. In present practise the engineering -- i.e. ugly kludges to get things working now, fast -- aspect is dominant almost to the exclusion of the two others. Has Haskell gone out of favour with you, or is it just GHC/Hugs' byzantine libraries. As I already said, the language itself (well, Haskell'98 anyway -- the extensions are rather crummy) is rather nice, but the libraries suffer from YAMMBHE. If you know of a better way, than a hierachy, of organising large amounts of (generally interdependant) code then I'd be interested to hear it. C doesn't need organisation... Now, namespaces would be nice, but I don't think they should form a global rigid hierarchy that will run without central bureaucratic control into conflicts just like a global (non-cryptographic) flat namespace. I think libraries should be imported locally in a given namespace. You know, like Haskell already lets you import libraries from the Huge Hierarchy locally in modules with a different name import qualified Some.Deeply.Nested.Crummy.Shit as S with Some.Deeply.Nested.Crummy.Shit actually provided by '-package foobar' on the command line, when it isn't part of the standard MegaCollection. So why not have various small libraries living in the operating system's namespace (the file system) and import them locally with some name, using the file name directly (instead of the compiler system, like GHC, having a crummy wheel-reinventing database for its own packages) -package S=/pkg/libfoobar-1/lib/libfoobar.so (Then further combine this with the cryptographic namespace of a package capability system [1].) [1]: http://iki.fi/tuomov/b/archives/2007/07/16/T22_41_22/ -- Tuomo
Re: Life, universe, and ION3
On 2007-10-09, Roy Lanek [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Is it a sardonic, or a WC graffiti-style (to borrow from your post) :) like answer? If yes, then you can stop reading, false alarm. No, it's semi-serious. But I guess this kind of stuff doesn't really belong in the WM itself. And, indeed, now with the some improvements I made to the status display stuff, you could run some panel application to do. But you'd probably want some WM interaction protocols to actually switch to a running program and so on. There actually was some interesting attempt to create a very kiosky WM, but it's been abandoned, and I can't remember its name. Icons, a dozen or two ones [airports, restaurants, etc.] excepted, truly belong to the *creme* of the crap--sugar candies--that has delayed developing in depth and re-discovering a much more intelligent way to interact with programs in general by keeping people attracted to it. No icons please. Icons aren't that bad for some applications and touch screens. Just like the acme/p9 mouse-heavy interface is just utter and total crap on vertical-screen-and-horizontal-controls tabletop computers, it might actually work quite nicely on touch screen tablets. The mouse is to a touch screen what a pantograph is to a pencil! -- Tuomo
Re: Life, universe, and ION3
On 2007-10-09 18:54 +0200, csant wrote: Twindy? Yep. http://www.niallmoody.com/twindy/. -- Tuomo
Re: Life, universe, and ION3
On Tue, 2007-10-09 at 15:07 +0200, ,,, wrote: Hi all! Some week ago i read about ION window-manager at the Hungarian Unix Portal. Due, I'm an engineering monkey, and i really hates wasting my time playing with the windows locations, i thought the tiling wm would be a good thing for me. So, i pulled down the ION2 from the Debian respository and give it a shot. My first thoughts: Simple, efficient and fast. After that, i dowloaded the ION3 source, and compiled it. snip There is also a Debian package of Ion3 (which I maintain) but due to Tuomo's trademark policy it is in the non-free section so you will have to add that to your APT sources to see it. Ben. -- Ben Hutchings I haven't lost my mind; it's backed up on tape somewhere. signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
Re: Life, universe, and ION3
On 2007-10-09, Roy Lanek [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Incidentally, and to get an idea of the *gravity* the situation: compare with ... Egypt and Greece, say, of the past. Were they not--ironically--more *artistically advanced* [read: provided with a more vivid imagination] still than ... hem, *we* anno 2007? (Hello *Teddy* [Adorno], who once called our *modern history* [cultural] *progressing* rather a regression into pre-agrarian times.) Umm... even cave-men must have had more vidid art and architecture than that of the more general chronic form of arrogance known as modernism. As for more post-modern stuff, it takes taste, which few have. Banalities are easy. Guess what?! icons are a bit limited--or then are completely arbitrary--as a medium and language to be used in defining and describing tasks to be accomplished through a *fantasy*- [sigh] less automaton and computer. They are wrong metaphors--actually a kind of aphasia, or incapability to speak and explain--as much as *cute* and *charming* [sigh] they may appear. Icons are very limited in their expressive power, and therefore they only work when there are just a few of them, that can be easily distinguished. But the typical WIMPshit application has tens of tiny ones lined up in a toolbar. -- Tuomo
Re: Life, universe, and ION3
On Tue, Oct 09, 2007 at 03:07:26PM +0200, ,,, wrote: snip Icon based, floating style application launcher. What do you mean here exactly? Just a launcher that uses icons? There are any number of applications that give you a bar of icons that can be customized to launch applications of your choice, in general I've found them less than helpful, annoying to keep configured with the applications I'm really using, and not significantly faster than a Run: dialog (mod1-F3 in the default bindings). Is there a specific type of launcher you are thinking about? Random floating icons? A toolbar full of icons? Something else? Is there something specific you want to launch with that? Would a popup or query menu of the specific applications work the same for you? snip -Etan
