[arch-projects] window manager thought

[Dusty Phillips]

This is sorta for Phrakture -- are you still working on a modular
window manager based on litestep, or did you give that project over?

but its also for anybody who's interested -- I know quite a few people
are looking for 'the perfect window manager' and believe that such a
program does not yet exist.

I know about virtual workspaces and multiple desktops. I also recall
Enlightenment allowing desktops bigger than the screen, but IIRC, you
could only see a full screen at a time.

What I'm thinking of now, is that often I need two windows open that
are, by necessity, bigger than half the width of the screen, and in
which I need to refer between the two often -- a browser and a text
editor are a good example when you're coding HTML (This headache came
to me at work, where I do web design and have to use WindowsXP and the
horrid default window manager that comes with it... hmm, maybe I
better try litestep. Man that would be cool, shock the hell out of my
boss... oh yeah, this is windows, don't worry about it... hehehe).

The way I generally work is to have the two windows overlap as little
as possible; one upper left and one lower right, with an overlapping
corner near centre screen, for example. I switch between the two as
needed, and it seems like 2/3 of the time, information I need to read
from one window is obliterated by the window that I am currently
working in. Ah, one way around this is to use the composite
extension...

But, I'm wondering if anybody knows about a Window manager that would
allow me to have the two windows side by side, not overlapping, but
with part of both windows off the side of the screen. As I move my
mouse to the right of the screen, it automatically moves the whole
viewport to the right so I can focus that window.

This is basically an extension of an 'infinite window manager' idea I
had a while ago in which windows would never overlap (sort of like a
tiling window manager, but they wouldn't necessarily have to be tiles;
they would be floating windows that could be dragged anywhere except
over top of other windows.) and the screen acts as a "viewport" into
the infinitely sized desktop. You can move the mouse over windows. Now
I'm even thinking that you could have the mouse always centred in the
screen, and moving the mouse would actually move the entire
viewport... would be hard to get used to, but could be interesting.

I'm always bad for giving way too much background information like
that. My questions are, does anybody know if any window managers that
implement some of these ideas exist, and/or, would anybody (ie:
phrakture) like to create something that could do this (ie: as a
litestep module)? Oh, and does anybody think it would be a good or bad
idea?

Dusty