KWin tiling progress

Between yesterday and today I made quite a lot of changes in kwin-tiling. Layouts now have a superclass which manages certain things. Each desktop now has its own layout. The root tile is no longer stored directly by the workspace, instead the workspace stores layouts for each desktop. For now each desktop has the Spiral layout, but it should be possible to dynamically change layouts for each desktop a few weeks down the line. Right now the plan is to fix certain layout issues ( such as spiral not understanding when a window is removed and adjusting the next one properly ).

The other major change is that cross virtual desktop moving is now supported. This was a major problem when it first arose, but once the first change was implemented, it was simply a matter of removing a tile from the old desktop and adding it to the new desktop.

There is no screenshot because none of these changes can be shown in a static image. But you can always try using the branch!

In other news I'm back in college. The third semester began yesterday, which means development time is now seriously down. I hacked on a (cool?) tool in the last two weeks, and I'll be announcing that soon. I'm also planning to add my blog to PlanetKDE.

The little things screw up

I had this really weird bug in kwin for half a week. When you started resizing windows, all of them would start dancing about the screen. There would be little gaps between them and so on. And I couldn't figure out why. So today I finally tried comparing ( x + width ) and ( right ) of a window. Turns out they are always off by one. So to the QRect::right() documentation:

Returns the x-coordinate of the rectangle's right edge.

Note that for historical reasons this function returns left() + width() - 1; use x() + width() to retrieve the true x-coordinate.

Argh! That ( and bottom() ) was causing the mess. What a relief.

KWin tiling ratios and orientations...

... now with minimize support.

KWin tiling has been proceeding forward at a steady rate. If you check out the latest revision, you will not only have a pretty stable experience, but will also get a design document for free.

So orientation is horizontal and vertical, and ratio is how much space the left child gets. Using these two properties I expect to be able to do most layouts. For now you can use D-BUS calls to actually use tiling pretty well.

Here are the calls

qdbus org.kde.kwin /KWin slotToggleOrientation
qdbus org.kde.kwin /KWin slotSetRatio <float> # between 0 and 1
qdbus org.kde.kwin /KWin dumpTiles  # get a nice tree if you have debugging enabled and visible

Some applications will cause trouble. Especially some plasma widgets and Kruler aren't setting the right window attributes, so I can't exempt them from tiling. So don't launch panel settings or Kickoff menu, it won't look so well.

Minimize and restore works now, it will keep track of where the window was before you minimized it and put it back there.

Please leave feedback about bugs here or on the KWin mailing list, it will be appreciated.

Nikhil meet Archlinux and KDE4

I've been home (Mumbai) this weekend and have been hacking away for the last two days to get Arch running on my external HDD, since I can't stand Mandriva anymore. The cool thing about Arch and Pacman is their flexibility. Following this guide I was able to install Arch from within my internal hdd arch, and have all the latest packages (including KDE 4.1).

There was only one problem which wasn't mentioned. External HDDs require usb support in the initrd which is not done in Arch by default. So before rebooting just edit /etc/mkinitcpio.conf and add "usb" to the line HOOKS="base udev …". Then remake the initrd using "mkinitcpio -g /boot/kernel26.img".

I must say I'm pretty impressed with KDE 4.1. There are still a few rough edges like the khotkeys keyboard shortcuts not working and some KWin effects not exactly doing anything. But overall a great effort.

KDE 4.0 out!

Well it isn't in the Arch Repos yet, but the release announcement and visual guide do make me drool :D.

And its good they made the panel go all the way to the edge of the screen.

aseigo on KDE 4

Talking Bluntly

Refreshing.
That will shut up the pessimists.