Re: [OT] Moving away from KDE to what?

[Marc Wilson <msw@cox.net>]

On Tue, Nov 12, 2002 at 10:08:05AM +0100, Alex Polite wrote:
> 1) Must be able to "maximize window to available space" a la
>    enlightenment.

I don't know anything that has *that*, save for E itself and probably one
of the ion-type window managers (which do it by definition).  That would be
an interesting idea to wedge into something like Blackbox or Openbox, both
of which support a smart-placement algorithm that tries to place a window
in a non-overlapping spot when it first maps (although Openbox is far
better at it).  What you describe would be extending that same algorithm to
a resize operation.

I'll point it out to the Openbox people.

> 2) Must support multiple sequence key bindings a la emacs.

Blackbox loses here, as its key-binding utility (bbkeys) doesn't support
chaining at all yet.  It will in its next version, according to the author.
Openbox's utility (epistrophy) does right now, like so:

# ~/.openbox/epistrc 103102
options {
	ChainTimeout 2500;
	stackedCycling true;
	stackedCyclingRaise true;
}

# Windows
Mod4-x {
    t toggleOmnipresent;
    s toggleShade;
    m toggleMaximizeFull;
    v toggleMaximizeVertical;
    h toggleMaximizeHorizontal;
    d toggleDecorations;
    i iconify;
    x close;
    n nextWindow;
    p prevWindow;
}

Epistrophy is a NETWM keygrabber, so it would also work with the current
CVS Blackbox.

> 3) Must be fast.

Then you definately want something along the lines of Blackbox/Openbox.
Speed is a primary design goal of Blackbox, and the Openbox fork hasn't
given that up. :)

I've not seen anything much faster except for stuff like aewm, which fails
#1 and #2 bigtime.

> 4) Must be faster.

See #3. :)

Personally, I'd recommend Openbox.  It has all of what you want, save parts
of #1.  It takes Blackbox and extends it to add stuff like support for AA,
customizable buttons, and more orthagonal style element support.

-- 
 Marc Wilson |     Recursion n.: See Recursion.  -- Random Shack Data
 msw@cox.net |     Processing Dictionary