[RP] Re: ratpoison idea

[Shawn Betts]

Mike Warren <address@hidden> writes:

> I don't know how feasible this might be, but: it would be neat to
> combine the idea of smaller windows from LarsWM and/or the idea of
> sort of iconic-windows from Enlightenment so that either all the time
> or when you do C-t w, you see:
> 
> +-----+------------------------+
> |     |                        |
> |     |                        |
> |-----|                        |
> |     |                        |
> |     |                        |
> |-----|                        |
> |     |                        |
> |     |                        |
> |-----|                        |
> |     |                        |
> |     |                        |
> +-----+------------------------+
> 
> With the strip on the left being miniaturised versions of any windows
> you can't see (ideally, these would display updated, shrunken images
> of whatever the "real" [full-screen] windows are doing). Obviously,
> somewhat resource-hungry I would imagine, but...
> 
> Is this even possible with X? (That is, can you get a window to redraw
> itself if it's not even on-screen?)
> 
> The little-windows could have numbers in their corners so one can
> easily do a C-t 0 or whatever to go to a window in which something
> interesting just happened (like maybe your log-tailer just produced a
> bunch of new output or something).
> 
> Thoughts?

Hi Mike,

Hmm, this sounds a bit wanky. You're lucky GNUS didn't just pipe your
mail to /dev/null with words like Enlightenment...

What would be gained from this? Is the window list that exists now
somehow inadequate? I think it would be neat, but I'm having trouble
understanding why it would be useful. What do you gain from having a
scaled copy of what the window looked like? Would it mostly be a waste
of valuable screen space?

It's possible, yes. Before the window is iconified, you could take a
snapshot or something. It's *possible*, but it would get hair I'm
sure.

Now I do think that being able to poll windows for graphical changes
would be useful, like the monitor feature in screen. That I'd
like. But that isn't trivial to implement (I would imagine
anyway). Patches are welcome :).

Shawn