_NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW tricks for new panel widget
As some of you may know, I have been working on creating some custom gtk widgets to be used for the panel (in Xfce 4.4). Well, some time ago I read this post on the wmspec mailing list that explains a trick that makes the kde panel work nicer.
The idea is that windows that set the dock type hint will not receive focus unless they specifically request it using a _NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW message. This has the nice effect that clicking on something on the panel will not remove the focus from the window you were working with.
Screenshot. This doesn’t show what I talked about, but what good is a blog entry without a screenshot? ;-)
trash management
Basic difference between 4.0 and 4.2 trash collection: 4.0 collected a
list of all files in wastebaskets. This proved to be too much. Therefore
4.2 only tabulates a list of the wastebaskets themselves.
If you need to eliminate a single wastebasket and all its contents, just
select it and press remove button (or delete key), either from trash or
folder branch. All undeletion needs to be done by looking into a
wastebasket, selecting something and pulling it out. This is exactly
what you do when you pull something out of the wastebasket in your
office/bedroom/kitchen. Only you and God know what you want to do with a
recovered file, so xffm will not play God and leave it up to you.
The trash bin. Yes the big trash bin is not very good for undeleting
stuff. It is like going outside the office building, jumping into the
truck size garbage container and looking for the post-it note you threw
away yesterday. All this before the garbage truck comes along. This is
what MS-windows, gnome, kde expect you to do. Not very considerate.
Since the xffm trash bin is *not* meant for undeleting stuff (it’s meant
for collecting and disposing of trash, just as in the office building
analogy), undeleting from anywhere other than wastebaskets is not
supported. Yes, you can go ahead and jump into the trash bin if like to.
Good luck if you do. ;-)
Since you have to undelete from wastebaskets, you should also delete the
wastebasket when empty. If you eliminate all wastebaskets with the trash
collection branch, wastebaskets are also removed.
Yes, xffm has a different philosophy regarding trash.
Xfce window manager now includes its own compositing manager
It tooks me a while and a lot of work to get the compositing manager working in xfwm4, the Xfce window manager (obligatory screenshot)
I’ve been asked why making a separate compositor rather than using X.org’s xcompmgr.
To make it short, because it makes perfectly sense. The compositor is like a WM on its own, it manages a stack of all windows, monitor all kinds on X event and reacts accordingly.
Having the compositing manager embedded in the window manager also helps keeping the various visual effects in sync with window events.
An RPM archive for fedora with compositor enabled is available here (source RPM here)
This package is to be used in place of the regular xfwm4 package from Xfce 4.2 RC2 available here