Subject: Fvwm Icon Manager enhancement

From: "Paul D. Smith" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Jul 97 11:56:01 EDT

OK, I've been playing with various icon managers, from fvwm2's builtin
iconbox and windowlist, to FvwmIconMan, to the task bar that fvwm95
uses, to tkgoodstuff's windowlist tool.

All of them are cool, but none do quite what I want.  I think what I
want would be most excellent (just saw Bill & Ted's again on Fox last
week :) so I'm asking if anyone can point me to something that can do
it, or is interested in modifying their particular manager to do it.

First, I have _tons_ of icons.  Most of them are of two basic types:
Emacs frames and rxvt windows.  There are some others thrown in for good
measure (ical, tkman, maybe a WWW browser, occasionally Frame, etc.)

The rxvt windows are also of a few discrete flavors: for example, we use
ClearCase at work and I have a specific ClearCase class of rxvt windows
that are set to ClearCase views.

I have so many icons they can't all be shown at once.  And I really hate
scrollbars in an icon manager; too cumbersome.

Here's what I'd like:

  * An interface like the 95 button bar where you get a button per task,
    then you click on it to raise/focus it, etc.

  * BUT!  It should be possible to define a _set_ of windows that would
    appear under one button.  Then I'd define one set for Emacs frames,
    one for ClearCase view rxvt's, etc.  And I'd get just one button no
    matter how many Emacs frames I had.

    When you picked a button that represented multiple windows, you'd
    get a popup listing each of the windows with its title (like the
    fvwm2 builtin windowlist).  Then you'd pick the one you wanted from
    that list.

  * The button bar should have an option for hiding itself, like win95
    and the new tkgoodstuff can, where it becomes a thin line against
    the edge of the screeen when the mouse moves off of it, then
    reappears when you move back over it.

  * In an ideal world, you could also define actions for each set; the
    actions would appear on the popup above the list of windows,
    separated by a line.  The actions could of course be commands, fvwm
    modules, or whatever.

    Right now I have an FvwmForm configured to start ClearCase views; it
    asks for a view name and invokes rxvt with a command to set to that
    view.

    So, for my rxvt ClearCase "set", I'd want my popup menu to be
    something like:

        .________________________.
        | New View               |
        `------------------------'
        ' psmith_view1 @ lemming `
        | psmith_view2 @ bronto  |
        | psmith_view3 @ whaler  |
        `------------------------'

    Then when "new view" was picked, my FvwmForm module is kicked off.

Anyway, you get the idea.

I _dream_ about this interface now that I've imagined it.  Can someone
help? :)

-- 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Paul D. Smith <[email-masked]>         Network Management Development
 "Please remain calm...I may be mad, but I am a professional." --Mad Scientist
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
     These are my opinions--Bay Networks takes no responsibility for them.
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