jd:/dev/blog - awesome

Documentation usefulness

jd — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 01:19:00 +0200

I had this books since 2 years under my screens to raise them at work. Never though of opening them, I just realized what they are some days ago.

That's probably why I became awesome without even knowing it. The truth is out there.

Analysing tiling window manager market

jd — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 11:19:00 +0200

I found an interesting but old analysis from Don Stewart about trends in the tiling window manager market.

I was curious so I tried to make it again to see the result 8 months later.

I took the vote data rather than installed, because it's more accurate: it tries to count people who use the software rather then people that just installed it. And we all know that installing a software does not mean you're using it.

awesome is rising fast. It has overtaken larswm and xmonad very quickly. Now it seems it just kicked wmii out of the game, and the next target will be the famous ion3, which should be deprecated in some weeks.

I'm very impressed. I never though it will happen that way. That stats, so it means anything you want them to mean, but I think it's very cool anyway.

I think that the next thing to do is to beat the floating-only window manager like the *box, etc… An interesting challenge, so stay tuned!

First release candidate for awesome 3

jd — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 17:11:00 +0200

It's done! After more than 6 months of work, more than 1000 changesets, I managed to get out awesome 3 first release candidate version! I've done a quick announcement on the list.

I am very excited to get some feedback about it. So far all I got has been very good.

I've also changed the Web site design.

awesome and XDG base dir spec

jd — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 10:50:00 +0200

awesome now supports XDG base directory specifications. A step further to join the FDO standards.

awesome 3 progress

jd — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 15:25:00 +0200

I've posted yesterday an overview of awesome 3 development state on the awesome mailing list.

To sum up, everything's fine. I hope this summer will see a good hacker-friendly window manager coming out.

awesome 3: Lua integration

jd — Tue, 20 May 2008 22:22:00 +0200

I must admit that the "no complicated configuration file" was an advantage for most users of awesome, but well, it was not possible to continue on this path.

As I explain in a mail on the awesome mailing-list, integrating a high level language for handling configuration was becoming necessary.

So I did it, I wrote a 10K lines patch (about +3K/-6K SLOC) that just drop all the libconfuse configuration handling and now export a Lua API. It took me about two weeks to complete this task, so it was not really hard. And I am so fucking happy that the code base is now even lighter (3K SLOC less for doing more!).

The Lua API is sometimes a PITA to understand, because there seems to be a lot of functions more or less connected or doing the same thing, and the separation between the core and the aux library is not always clear to beginners. But in the end, it's a language really easy to integrate, and very easy to learn. Lovely.

Now it's possible to do almost everything possible in awesome, since you can now have conditional configuration and hooks to do stuff on events (i.e. change window border size on focus, toggle title bars when switching to floating layout, …). The configuration file format and syntax is I guess still clear.

You can also execute Lua code on the fly and manipulate objects, like I did in this small video demonstration recorded a few days ago.

Extending pango markup attributes

jd — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 10:00:00 +0200

I'm currently facing a problem I just can't solve, involving pango and GMarkup's glib API.

I currently use pango markup in awesome, but I'd like to extend it to support more attributes.

Pango markup uses GMarkup API to parse the formatted string. The problem is that there's no way to extend what is parsed, and if a tag is unknown in the pango parser, it will just fail.

I've tried to implement my own parser with GMarkup, but… When I encounter a tag I don't know but that pango does, I just can't pass it to the pango parser function for this tag, since this pango function is private.

There was a try to extends the markup parser 2 years ago, but the patch was crappy since it exposed the private elements of pango markup parsing, which is the bad way to solve this.

So for now, I've no idea how to do this. I was first using the bad parsing method with string.h's functions which I for now reverted, because I do not really like that.

awesome: from 2 to 3

jd — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 09:32:00 +0200

Last week I sent a mail about the upcoming developement strategy for awesome.

Long story short; we begin to work on awesome 3, dropping Xlib in favor of XCB, bringing out the first window manager using this bindings (if you do not count the demo one in the source repository ;-)).

Thanks to the amazing grunt work of Arnaud Fontaine, we already have a working version of awesome using XCB, and it works very very well. Better API, better code, and even faster code. That is awesome.

awesome 2.3-rc1 was released this morning so we'll begin shortly to work on the 3 branch and merge it into the master one.

The sloppy focus

jd — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 12:28:00 +0100

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.

First RC version for awesome 2.1

jd — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 13:04:00 +0100

And here we are. awesome 2.1 is coming! And it's really really nice.

It got a brand new set of widgets (icons, text, progress bar, tasklist, etc) for the statusbar, which is very configurable.

It also has a better EWMH support, which brings things like stick or fullscreen state support.

I still have to write the changelog between 2.0 and 2.1, but git log shows near 400 commits, it's gonna be a bit long.

EWMH and XRandR

jd — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 19:48:00 +0100

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.

Christmas gifts for awesome users

jd — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 21:35:00 +0100

I was ill since several days, and totally unable to work and even more on awesome.

Today I tried to hack a little and so I've add 2 new widgets using the new widget system Aldo wrote last week.

First we have a iconbox widget which can draw any PNG you want it to:

And then.. the support for the so legen... wait for it.... wait a little more... dary! NET_WM_ICON:

Second release candidate for awesome 2.0 released

jd — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 18:35:00 +0100

Hopla, awesome 2.0-rc2 released.

Cool. Happy me.

awesome 2.0-rc1

jd — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 22:47:00 +0100

awesome 2.0-rc1 released and waiting in Debian NEW queue.

awesome developement

jd — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 11:04:00 +0100

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.

awesome 1.2: guided tour

jd — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 20:04:00 +0200

Today I finally released awesome 1.2. I also wrote a guided tour which presents some of the functionalities of awesome.

awesome

jd — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 17:58:00 +0200

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