[GTALUG] Emacs as X Windows Manager?

[Christopher Browne]

On 5 August 2015 at 08:05, Giles Orr <gilesorr at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 5 August 2015 at 01:52, William Park <opengeometry at yahoo.ca> wrote:
> > http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=EXWM-Window-Manager
> >
> > Now, all it needs is an editor...
>
> A long time ago (more than a decade) someone used XEmacs as the basis
> of a window manager:
>
> http://www.nongnu.org/xwem/
>
> It's been pretty much abandoned for the last seven years.


The nearest to "in practice" that has arrived is the series of tiling
window managers
that have UIs loosely similar to GNU Screen.

I'm thinking of ratpoison, stumpwm, dwm, and such.  The model they take
is that windows correspond (more or less) to Emacs buffers, and one's
attachment of a set of buffers to the display (e.g. - which buffers you've
got visible) correspond to a "workspace" concept.

You set up key bindings to let you adjust window ("buffer") visibility on
screen,
and key bindings to let you switch workspaces (which would lead to
displaying
a different set of buffers/windows).

I'm usually using stumpwm these days, almost always with just one workspace,
so that I see one window at a time, switching when I want to head to another
window ("buffer").

That seems to be where control of this has gone.  There may have been some
code around to enable having Emacs talk directly to stumpwm, not obvious
where it is (and I notice that the repo has moved from Savannah to GitHub,
which probably means I need to "rebase" my use of it; I've apparently been
tracking a dead-ish branch).  Direct Emacs integration has gotten pretty
secondary, it seems.

I think I'd be way more inclined to use stumpwm, and have some Emacs
hooks to talk to it (which isn't hard to have) than to talk directly to X
from
Emacs.
-- 
When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"
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