I’ve been using xmonad (with a slightly modified bluetile setup) for about a year now, and it’s been pretty great. But I still feel locked in to its grid sometimes, and miss the direct manipulation that a “normal” window manager (like metacity) provides - specifically allowing quick movement and resizing by using alt + mouse dragging. Bluetile has the option of floating windows, but actually moving or resizing them is so cumbersome that it’s not really worth it. I also sometimes wish that my windows could overlap, so that (while still tiled) a window can extend beyond the bounds of its tile if I want it to.

I also am a sucker for shiny things, and xmonad is far from a shiny thing (in terms of graphics). I tried out gnome-shell yesterday, and while buggy, it is exceedingly shiny. And considering that gnome-shell will not allow alternate window managers (that was a surprise to me), I have put some thought into what my ideal window manager would look like.

I’m keen to try and implement this somewhere. It’s unlikely to be xmonad, as I want builtin compositing support (and haskell is a great language, but I can barely figure out how to configure xmonad, let alone extend it). So I’m wondering if the following can be done as a plugin to either gnome-shell or mutter. Hopefully gnome-shell, as I can stomach javascript hacking a lot easier than compiling C extensions.

Also, if people know of an existing project (with compositing!) that has these sorts of features, I’d be interested to know - I don’t want to have to reinvent the wheel, but it seems like most tiling window managers are too rigid and keyboard-based for me, while most “grid” extensions to floating window managers are too manual.

So, here’s the plan:

Also known by the longer title: I Sure Hope Zero-Install Succeeds, Or Else We Might All Give Up On Package Managers Entirely.

If you’ve tried to run any of my software lately, you may have noticed that it’s all distributed and packaged via Zero-Install. I’ve posted about how awesome it is, but that was just an initial impression - I’m now familiar enough with the system to expand on those impressions.

After reading that the distros have killed python yesterday, I felt compelled to write in a little more detail how zero-install solves this and many other problems right now, across platforms and languages, and for much less effort than the current packaging practices.

I’ve recently started using bluetile instead of compiz, and I think I’m going to stick with it. Bluetile is a tiling window manager, but it’s not like all those other tiling window managers*:

• it’s simple
• it’s easy to learn
• it’s built with GNOME support out of the box
• it still supports direct manipulation style using the mouse if you just want to change a window’s size, or swap window locations. I think this is crucial for keeping it accessible to new people like myself.

* well okay, it is like those other tiling window managers. Specifically, it’s built on xmonad. But it presents a simple veneer over the vast complication that is xmonad (I should know, I tried to configure it just last week ;)).

Bluetile is, sadly, notoriously difficult to install. But there are good guides around, I used this one for ubuntu karmic.

The good news is, bluetile has recently been merged back into the xmonad mainline. And xmonad is apt-gettable (at least on ubuntu). So in theory, the next release of xmonad will make it pretty easy to run in bluetile mode, without having to compile-your-own-window-manager (which certainly does not make for a gentle learning curve). If anyone is considering playing around with alternate window managers, it’s definitely worth your while to give bluetile a go.

I’ve long been interested in étoilé. It’s a linux distribution built on top of GNUStep, aiming to provide a more modern (read: prettier and generally a bit more Apple-Like) operating system than the GNUStep base. Obviously as a mac user who has switched to linux for its openness, this is a pretty tempting idea.

Anyways, I recently downloaded the VirtualBox image to take it for a test run. Aside from there not really being much software to use yet (making it hard to take for a spin), I noticed this in the system menu. It’s probably somewhat more important to get your character encoding right if you’re going to be all fancy and have accents in your name ;)

I just discovered zenity, which is a great tool for simple gtk+ interactions with a script.

It has the following types of interactions:

• calendar (date picker)
• file / directory selection
• error / info message
• list picker
• question (yes/no)
• progress dialog
• systray notification
• and more… ( see the man page )

The usage is brilliantly simple, and it’s very unixy despite being a GUI tool. I just wrote a pygtk+ app to do some photo importing stuff, but doing it with zenity would have been far simpler.

Well worth keeping in mind for your next user-friendly shell scripts (particularly for the more advanced progress, calendar and list picker dialogs).

..in which I propose a potentially-new window management feature, and hope that somebody has already done it so that I won’t have to…