[RP] some bugs, suggestions and kudos

[John Meacham]

I have recently switched to ratpoison from ion and love it. however it
seems to have several bugs when working with multiple screens.

bugs:

when an app closes it will sometimes try to bring a window from the
other screen to the current frame. This can't happen since windows can't
migrate between screens, the end effect is that the window is brought to
the top of whatever screen it is on, but the frame that ratpoison thinks
has focus is on the wrong window. (it will also size the app as if it
were on the incorrect screen)

fselect should allow selection of frames from all screens, right now it
only allows selection from the current screen. 

'only' will sometimes hide windows on other screen in addition to
maximizing the current window on the current screen.

exec exec's programs on the wrong screen. (this is new in
1.2.0-beta4, it wasn't in 1.1.1). a sort of work around is to do a 
:setenv DISPLAY :0.1 before running apps, but this is sort of hacky and
not very convienient.

fdump only stores current screen. 

plus, ratpoison just does odd things sometimes. I have not been able to
classify the oddness into repeatable events, but they usually occur when
i try to do a 'nextscreen' or 'next'. 'select' seems to be the only way
to select a window that consistantly works. There is probably just some
broken logic somewhere localized which will make all these multi-screen
issues work out.


enhancements:

option to have messages always appear on one screen, screen 1 is
somewhat out of the way to look at. Especially since the gravity is
global for all screens so it can't be placed in a 'central' location
always.

ability to 'exec' programs on arbitrary screens. this could be used in
your .ratpoisonrc to call xsetroot on each screen. or sometimes you
might want a keybinding which ran something on a particular monitor.

mouse click should abort a pending control-t. (or be bindable, so can be
set to a null command)

option to always show certain windows when a control-t is pending. for
instance, after control-t is pressed always have the window list up and
frame numbers shown until a command is issued. my mouse is often
banished so just changing the cursor doesn't do much. plus the extra
info will come in handy.

perhaps split the window list by screen? maybe not. not sure if this is
an issue since it can be remembered, but the UI should reflect that only
certain apps can be brought into the current frame (those connected to
the current screen)

XINERAMA support. this is an alternate method of doing multiple screens,
just read the XINERAMA structure and set up permament frames on each
monitor then act normally. (except you would be unable to kill the
frames and 'only' etc... would resize the app on the current monitor
only). not sure whether this is better than multiple screens. with
multiple screens you get OpenGL and Xvideo and multiple visuals, with
Xinerama you get the ability to move apps between screeens. 

the ability to retreat and advance on a screen. commands to have
ratpoison give up control of a screen temporarily, to run another window
manager. there is no need to quit ratpoison to run another window
manager, ratpoison will still be running and accepting C-t's but won't
manage screens it has retreated from. you could 'advance' (attack?)
ratpoison back onto a screen when you feel like it. This would be
way cool and useful even with a single screen. you could have ratpoison
retreat and run fvwm, but still have all your (non-window related)
ratpoison commands available and it keeps running so you won't loose any
state.

        John

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John Meacham - California Institute of Technology, Alum. - address@hidden
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