For those who dunno what winwatch is in Plan 9: http://cm.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/1/winwatchAnyway, winwatch is rather specialized compared to the bottom bar of wmii, and it simply accesses /dev/wsys/ namespace. But an external wmiibar would need a 9P interface to be feed with input. An external wmiibar also has the disadvantage that this increases the 'choice' for users to a point, that many questions will arise ('Why don't you do this in default setup...') what we should prevent in keeping the bar as simple as possible, but at least also as usable as possible. Personally I'd be fine with a single label, but I haven't extended the bar for my personal use that much. But several things come to my mind what I'd like todo, esp. dynamic creation of temporary notification labels, which might have a red background color and a yellow text color for exceptions in the network infrastructure I maintain at my University).
For such stuff just use a separated sticky app. I think that trying to put too much functionality into the bar is a big mistake, it should be a simple tag bar, and at most have an extra field aligned to the right which can be used for status scripts or whatever. I see no need for special formating or whatever for any of this, if you like you can run clock(1) or stats(1) sticky and put them on a corner or whatever. And I never said something like winwatch(1) should replace the whole bar, all I said that for selecting among views it would work just fine.
> Anyway, obviously the 'master-tagbar' should be builtin. Sure. > >> What is needed is a way to 1) resize the managed area(across all > >> views?) 2) make floating clients 'sticky' (ie., stay in place across > >> views); neither seems particularly hard once wmii internals are > >> cleaned up. > > > >1) Agreed. > >2) Is already there through tagging, thus nothing new. > > Wrong, that is not what i meant, sticky-floating clients should appear > in all views always in the same position (and they should show up in > all views even if the tag for the new view did not exist when the > client was started). Basically sticky clients are in an extra layer on > top of views that is always visible. You mean something like the OSX widgets layer or the ion3 scratchpad layer? That might be worth considering (esp. for external dockbar apps). We need in any case the possibility to define the width (at least) of the managed layer relatively that such an sticky layer would make any sense.
What I mean is that they should be on a layer on top of both managed and unmanaged layers (in the Z axis). they should be free floating and should be possible to move anywhere, both over the managed area or anywhere else, I see no point in restricting their possition as they are basically fixed in place. I also think that probably (not sure) it is a good idea to make the geometry of the managed area the same across all views. uriel _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list http://wmii.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/wmii
