Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

jemimah · Joined: 26 Aug 2009 Posts: 4309 Location: Tampa, FL

This pet is the first result of months of tinkering, thinking creatively, and obsessive coding.

The goal is to develop a window manager and DE that is convenient to use on small screened netbooks.

Important Concepts:
-All features must be conveniently accessable on a small trackpad, relying on keyboard shortcuts is not acceptable
-Panels, pagers, and other DE furniture must not consume screen real-estate
-Top-side titlebars consume too much vertical screen real-estate on a "short-screen"
-Autohide is annoying
-Using the mouse excessively is annoying
-Using the keyboard excessively is annoying

This pet includes a highly patched and customized version of Flwm. I chose Flwm because it's very light, and has vertical titlebars, a pager on the root menu, and convenient horizontal/vertical maximize buttons.

This pet also includes a patched version of Rox, with panel-autohide removed. It didn't work very well anyway so I've implemented a better way to raise the panel.

That better way, I've named yaf-panel. Yaf-panel is just yaf-splash with a couple extra features and some creative scripting. Yaf-panel allows you to utilize corners and edges to make tiny buttons that are easy to click on and don't get in the way. It also allows you to make a clock/statusbar that stays on top, doesn't hog screen space, and hides when clicked.

In addition, I've bundled Dmenu with special scripts to make a Taskbar, Pager, and Application Launcher which appear on-demand when the yaf-corner buttons are clicked.

Finally, I've added dozens of new features to a utility called Tile. Tile is a window-manager-independent tool for tiling windows. This means you can reap all the benefits of having a tiling window manager, with none of the limitations and irritations. I've used it to script an Expose'-like functionality, and you can cycle through different tiling algorithms at the touch of a button. With Flwm, you can also use the Tiler to remove window title bars, and you can put them back at any time.

Download and screenshot explaining the functions of the yaf-panels are here: http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=47192