(08-12-2020, 04:29 AM)Guest0x0 Wrote: I am not familiar with C/S application development, but I feel that all those 9 windows are not "necessary" to some extent. Indeed, all of them are "needed", but that does not imply that they are needed "on screen" at the same time. And that's exactly my intention behind distinguishing "visible" and "available" windows. The 4 monitoring windows are perhaps unavoidable, I guess. But the code editing windows may not be necessary when viewing the logs and gdb outputs, and the terminal is only necessary when you are trying to enter some commands (if I have not misunderstood your intention), under which circumstances you are probably focused on the terminal itself, and letting it float on other windows may be acceptable. A 2x2 grid may still not be adequate, but I believe that if calling out a hidden window or hiding one is as easy as moving the focus, the number of windows necessary *on the screen* can be reduced, and hence gaining more spaces for windows on the screen.

Well, it was more like: a system bus and 2 of it's consumers. To reproduce bugs, one often had to trigger inputs from clients in a specific order (yeah, was a joy) thus the 3 debuguers, to "encourage" processes to go in the right path.
The 3 other terminals were for actions inside each process's directory, including checking their logs: they were separate applications. I didn't used a window to edit code, but to read it, because it was more convenient than jumping around with cgdb, especially considering gdb (and cgdb) do not remember the watchers and other stuff natively.
Reducing the number of windows on the screens is doable, of course, same as for toggling the fullscreen/floating modes, but that implies bigger context switches for my brain, and things were enough of a mess :D

(08-12-2020, 04:29 AM)Guest0x0 Wrote: The idea of temp workspace seems attractive to me. I wonder what key you use to switch to/move window to it?

Same as for normal workspaces, the point here was purely semantic. Also, 5 and 6, because it lets me have 4 workspaces on my main screen which is on the left side, 2 "floating" ones, 3 on the secondary screen which is on right side, and a mail+monitoring and other minor stuff (with xosview: https://xosview.sourceforge.net) on the secondary screen, fixed on the wp 0.
It works with having most workspaces tied to a specific screen. I also have a shortcut which allows me to move to and from main screen without having to remember which workspace is currently enabled there.

In short: moving something to temp wp5: $mod+shift+5. Bringing it back implies going there, focus it, and $mod+shift+5 again (I like back-and-forth feature).
If I needed that way of doing things, I'd probably tinker a script based on xdotools and i3-msg though. I recently used xdotool to build a script that "spawns/update an unfocused window" when I update a specific file: http://www.deadbeef.fr/projects/dotter/f...tcher.html . It's not clean, but it works, even if yes, I think it should be a lot easier... hum, actually, this gave me an idea... I may improve that soon :)

(08-12-2020, 04:29 AM)Guest0x0 Wrote: I guess bringing out my idealized window manager here may make my points clearer. If we add a "window list", or "window index" to each workspace, which contains all windows in the workspace, displayed or not, then we can support commands like "swap this window with one in the list" or "call out a window in the index". We may also support putting a complete layout containing multiple windows into the list. This is actually similar to some sort of enhanced scratchpad or pseudo workspace.

You could use tab-mode or stack mode, here, combined with marks (same as in vim, but also same as in vim, I don't use them :)), but I guess you'd be annoyed with the title bars? I'm not sure, but I think this can be disabled though.

(08-12-2020, 04:29 AM)Guest0x0 Wrote: My intention behind this design is to make "putting some temporarily unneeded window away, and restore it later" as convenient as possible, so that users can throw away some windows at any time with ease, gaining more screen space, for "necessary" content, without suffering from all the burden to restore the original layout. In my opinion, making every corner on the screen display *something* is not maximizing screen usage, making every corner display something *being watched and used* is the right way to go.

In short, you would like a way to put a container in full screen? That would be awesome, indeed.