Re: FVWM: FvwmIconMan: MiniIcons and Minimization

From: Brady Montz <bradym_at_cs.arizona.edu>
Date: 16 Jul 1997 12:37:38 -0700

Brian Sayatovic <bjs_at_iti-oh.com> writes:

> I've noticed that the MiniIcons used with FvwmIconMan are only drawn on
> buttons for minimized windows, Is there a way to disable this so that
> they are drawn on a window regardless of its state? I'd prefer to use
> this for my one particular manager where I use ONLY the icons ina
> 'tray-like' area, and no distinguishing text. They just sort of
> disappear when I click them to restore the window.
>
> Brian.
> --

Well, the original intent was that the miniicons are used to denote which
windows are iconified. I've been toying with the idea of adding code that
allows you to specify other ways of showing this, but haven't really figured
out a nice way.

Basically, I'd like to completely generalize the format string. Like add a
specifier for the miniicon (like %m) and a way to conditionalize when certain
fields of the format string are shown. Like maybe an icon which is displayed
for sticky windows. Or a way to say: show the resource name for all windows
except when it equals "Netscape" since Netscape titles look like "Netscape:
blah blah blah" anyway. I'd also like to be able to show the window geometry
in the button, so that I could determine which of my "emacs: *scratch*"
windows I want to uniconify. And, I need to be able to right justify the whole
string. What would be really cool is if I could specify a maximum size for a
particular field, and control the justification of that field in it's little
region. I could just use printf syntax for that.

This ties in with wanting to make it so that you could use the state of the
windows to determine which manager manages them, since I'd have to grab some
code from fvwm to do the parsing of strings like "!iconic" and whatnot. I've
had a request to make an option so that a manager window would only list
iconified windows. But I can imagine wanting to only show uniconified windows,
or (un)sticky windows. So you could have one manager for iconfied windows, and
one for the uniconified windows.

Basically, I guess I'm coming perilously close to just dropping a python
interpreter into FvwmIconMan, since all of this is starting to become
unwieldy. It bas bad enough when I made one extension language for the
actions. Adding another extension language to control what gets drawn in the
buttons (and printf like format strings are a simple language; adding
conditionals makes it unsimple), is starting to get out of control.

FvwmIconMan is starting to truly act like an icon manager, just as fvwm is a
window manager.

Another potential cool thing is if (maybe by drag and drop - yow!) you could
use FvwmIconMan to group windows. Make a little key command to create a new
window manager, and drag buttons from one manager to the next. Then make some
fvwm commands to act on entire groups of windows, and use FvwmIconMan to be a
graphical interface for managing all of that. That would be cool. He he. I'd
love to iconify all of my netscape windows at once, or move all of my xterms
titled "al01 *" en masse to another desktop.

Man, and I've got a thesis to work on too. Good thing my advisor doesn't read
this list :-)

-- 
 Brady Montz
 bradym_at_cs.arizona.edu
--
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Received on Wed Jul 16 1997 - 14:38:00 BST

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