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dynamic tagging (like wmii)

Added by Suraj Kurapati over 13 years ago

Hello,

I'm having a hard time adjusting to subtle's mandatory tagging approach. I come from wmii, where: when I launch a new client, I expect it to appear on the current view (unless I set up some tagging rules for it in my WM configuration beforehand). In subtle, such clients are automatically tagged with "default" and only appear on the first view instead of the current view.

I tried working with Subtle's mandatory tagging approach by adding "|default" to all of my view definitions:

view "www", "browser|default" 
view "dev", "editor|default"

But that brings all untagged (default) clients into all of my views. :-(

Is there an easy way to have a newly launched client appear on the same view that I'm currently looking at?

Thanks for your consideration.


Replies (1)

RE: dynamic tagging (like wmii) - Added by Christoph Kappel over 13 years ago

Ok, let me start with explaining the difference between wmii and subtle in placement:

wmii

  • wmii uses ruleset that can change the placement of windows
  • When no rules can be applied it moves the window to the current tag (I think that is the right terminology there?)

subtle

  • subtle uses tags that absolutely define placement.
  • When no tags are available subtle applies the default tag, to ensure that the window is visible at least.

The main difference is that tagging is mandatory in order for placement to work, tags are used all over in subtle to determine if a client is visible on a certain view. I don't see a need for this weak tagging, because it may be useful in some isolated situations but most of the time it sucks. (I like to call it weak, because dynamic is wrong, imho. The opposite of dynamic is static and you just can change tagging per runtime)

So how can we solve that issue for, the question is kind of common though. First address is this FAQ entry, it basically explains how to launch clients e.g. via launcher. The other way is to use the current-view snippet which does exactly what you are looking for: It creates a tag for each view and applies it to clients, that just have the default tag.

People seem to understand the tagging in subtle as a kind of barrier, it is just an interface for placement.

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