jd:/dev/blog

While most of you people and readers are doing quick and great works in Python, Ruby, or any modern language, there's still people like me fighting with The Low Level.

I like that, but the X architecture is just the proof of concept of an architecture which wrongly evolved because it was not designed to. Xlib and all concepts it is based upon where probably fun and sufficient in the 80's, but nowaday, it can really be a joke. I really hope that somedays Xorg will break things and start a new fresh X design (at least from Xlib point of view).

It's not that I think Xorg people are doing bad stuff, but there are mostly bailling out from a long code and design history IMHO.

So, last weeks I was trying to fix the sloppy focus in awesome. I've found a real interesting Web page from Alex Hioreanu about various issues that we encountered too. I've been trying ahwm hack, but it's not really reliable.

And then I've been trying a lot of things, and this morning I figured out something which works pretty well. It just fails in some corner case with GTK+ apps that are not reporting XMotionEvent when the pointer move, and I don't know why and how get them.

Let's see.

Today I decided to add some EWMH support to awesome. It now supports a bunch of this extensions quite nicely.

However, while reading the spec and writing the code, it appears that this forces a window manager to behave in only one way: have a poor desktop support, and no multi-head/XRandR/Xinerama support at all.

The main caveats are that in Xinerama/XRandR mode, you'll have only one root window. And the root window is where you must store the NET_WM X properties… So you cannot handle screens in a independant way like awesome does. That's really a shame.

There's also a big problem for window managers like awesome which are happy to draw several desktops at the same time. There's no support for stuff like that.

So far, I think EWMH is nice but is really too narrow-minded for softwares and people who want to think window management in a different way.

Hopla, awesome 2.0-rc2 released.

Cool. Happy me.

awesome developement is in a very good shape.

We're now more than half way on the 2.0 road. The contributors base is increasing, since there's now 2-3 people regularly sending patches, so this is very good, and the (still small) users base is increasing smoothly.

The awesome core code is step by step rewritten in a better and more generic way. The next big work is tabs implementation, that I am still postponing right now because of the core which is not ready to handle. It needs to become even more generic to not break everything by adding such a feature.

I still hope to release awesome 2.0-rc1 by the end of november.

Then, I did it finally, I wrote my own window manager. \o/