Window Management on Compiz-Fusion – New Plugins

7 de Novembro de 2008, 0:00, por Software Livre Brasil - sem comentários ainda

Well, on the last post we (Eduardo Gurgel aka edgurgel & Marco Diego aka Bacharel Marcola) said that new useful plugins were coming soon. This is a brief look on what we’re currently working and a preview on what else is coming.

Compiz has been well taught since its inception as a beautiful, feature-rich (in terms of bling and effects), modern window manager. Although we agree in most of what is said about compiz, its abilities for window placement, window distribution and good use of screen real state were terribly lacking compared to other window managers such as tiled-window-managers (ion, wmii, dwm…). We’ve been working to minimize this inferiority.
For those who can’t wait for a better explanation, here’s a video showing whats is going on:

Plugins used:

New Maximumize
It expands the window on a specified direction as much as possible. It is totally based on Maximumize plugin.

Code
Video

Minimumize
Resize to half size of the window in a particular direction.

Code
Video

Smart Put
Cleverly find the best gap suitable for the current window.

Code
Video

New Put
It’s equal to Put plugin, but you can move only through empty spaces.

Code
Video

Toggle Decoration
Simple and very useful plugin to enable/disable window decoration(on a window, or all of them on the same desktop). You will discover how much space you waste with your window decorator. Toggle Decoration is totally necessary for us because we don’t use maximize and minimize anymore.

Code

Swap
Swap window’s location and size. Simple like that.
Useful when you have a main frame and others smaller windows on same desktop. You can quickly change the scope.

Code still not available. We will release ASAP.

Next steps
We noticed that all we need is love.
Just Kidding.
All we need is an automatic layout windows definition. So you can easily define YOUR own window arrangement. We will work on it on next weeks (maybe months).

P.S.: No mice were harmed during the making of this video.

Tagged: compiz, compiz fusion, development, fusion, linux, management, marcola, maximumize, minimumize, new put, plugin, smart put, window, window management

Window Management on Compiz-Fusion – New Plugins

7 de Novembro de 2008, 0:00, por Software Livre Brasil - sem comentários ainda

Well, on the last post we (Eduardo Gurgel aka edgurgel & Marco Diego aka Bacharel Marcola) said that new useful plugins were coming soon. This is a brief look on what we’re currently working and a preview on what else is coming.

Compiz has been well taught since its inception as a beautiful, feature-rich (in terms of bling and effects), modern window manager. Although we agree in most of what is said about compiz, its abilities for window placement, window distribution and good use of screen real state were terribly lacking compared to other window managers such as tiled-window-managers (ion, wmii, dwm…). We’ve been working to minimize this inferiority.
For those who can’t wait for a better explanation, here’s a video showing whats is going on:

Plugins used:

New Maximumize
It expands the window on a specified direction as much as possible. It is totally based on Maximumize plugin.

Code
Video

Minimumize
Resize to half size of the window in a particular direction.

Code
Video

Smart Put
Cleverly find the best gap suitable for the current window.

Code
Video

New Put
It’s equal to Put plugin, but you can move only through empty spaces.

Code
Video

Toggle Decoration
Simple and very useful plugin to enable/disable window decoration(on a window, or all of them on the same desktop). You will discover how much space you waste with your window decorator. Toggle Decoration is totally necessary for us because we don’t use maximize and minimize anymore.

Code

Swap
Swap window’s location and size. Simple like that.
Useful when you have a main frame and others smaller windows on same desktop. You can quickly change the scope.

Code still not available. We will release ASAP.

Next steps
We noticed that all we need is love.
Just Kidding.
All we need is an automatic layout windows definition. So you can easily define YOUR own window arrangement. We will work on it on next weeks (maybe months).

P.S.: No mice were harmed during the making of this video.

Smart Put Plugin

4 de Novembro de 2008, 0:00, por Software Livre Brasil - sem comentários ainda

It’s not so simple to explain what this plugins does, so, since an image is worth a thousand words, maybe a video is worth a thousand images:

Explanation:
It puts the current window in the empty region of the screen with maximum available free space!
It was born from the perception with the combined use of maximumize/minumumize plugins: sometimes everything we just wanted was to put a window in an available empty region of the screen. So… we did it!
As is becoming a standard in this kind of plugin most of the code is inspired/stolen from the maximumize plugin.The algorithm is actually dumb and, maybe, it’s even not correct, but in our tests it worked pretty damn well.

The plugin works like this: a window has four corners. For each window, on each corner we put a box with height 1 pixel and width of 1 pixel. Using routines from the maximumize plugin we expand these boxes and find witch one has maximum area. If the box with maximum area is bigger than the current window box than we just set a new box for the current window. And believe-me: it works!

Finally: It is another useful plugin from us (Eduardo Gurgel and Marco Diego)! You can wait for more useful plugins coming soon!

Code here

(Modified) Maximumize and Minimumize

29 de Outubro de 2008, 0:00, por Software Livre Brasil - sem comentários ainda

Marco Diego(Marcola) and Eduardo Gurgel(me) were thinking about how improve window management on Compiz-Fusion. We decided to work on it modifying Maximumize and creating Minimumize.

First we modified Maximumize plugin to maximumize on any direction. Later, we created Minimumize plugin that allows the user to set the window to half the size in a specified direction. Hard to imagine? Watch the videos: