Bluetile/Development

Development

This page is a place to brainstorm ideas for the further development of Bluetile. Comments and suggestions are welcome! I (JanV) currently don't have the time to work on any of these actively. So if you feel like trying your hands on some of these ideas, your patches are welcome.

Pretty window decoration

The current window decoration used by Bluetile is fairly bare bones, just sketching out the basic controls. I would like to improve on that. I'm not an artist, so if possible I would like to reuse something.

That gave me the idea to look into Compiz, which has several different possible decorators. Maybe it is possible to reuse the decorator of Compiz in Bluetile - like Compiz's gtk-window-decorator. This should allow for a very Metacity-like decoration.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find much documentation on how exactly Compiz talks with its decoration manager. These e-mails contain some information:

* http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/compiz/2006-April/000009.html
* http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/compiz/2007-April/001935.html

As far as I understand it, one marks the windows to be decorated with a special property. The decoration manager looks for windows with that property and prepares pixmaps with the decoration. The pixmaps are then communicated back to the window manager which draws them. Somehow a library called libwnck plays into all this and helps with some of the steps. It might be necessary to use Haskell's foreign function interface to make use of this library ( http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/haskell/ffi/ ).

All of this is just a vague idea. I'm not sure if it is actually possible - especially considering that Compiz is a compositing window manager where different rules might apply (?). Comments from people with more insight into this area are appreciated. :-)