[openbox] events & actions

[Ava Arachne Jarvis]

[Marius Nita - Sun,  3 Nov 2002 11:47:41 PM CST]
> so what are actions? i have only vague thoughts about this so far, but an
> action is associated with something which happens in the wm at the user level.
> for example, shading a window is an action. so is moving one, closing one,
> opening a menu, highlighting the next item in a menu, etc. this works much
> like epist's actions.

Also like Waimea's actions, which also cover mouse actions (dragging,
clicking, etc).  Look at their manual page, at 

  http://axtorpsv044.sn.umu.se/cgi-bin/man/man2html?waimea

under "ACTIONS".  

> i think this will rock. OBXEvent will hold the XEvent pointer, OBSignalEvent
> will hold the signal to handle, and OBActionEvent will hold a pointer to the
> Action object, which holds enough information about what needs to be done. in
> the ob event loop, it will be a matter of telling the right object to handle
> the event. I'm still not sure about how to exactly identify which handler func
> is called.

Sounds like a table is called for?  Each event type has only one
handler, or possibly a list of handlers.


> now, these actions are cool things. why? because it opens the door to an
> action-based highly configurable system--we discussed this a while back. the
> user will be potentially able to say
> 
>  # move window with alt-left click
>  action {
>  	binding Mod1-LeftClick
> 	location all
> 	action startMove
>  }
> 
>  # resize window with alt-right click
>  action {
>  	binding RightClick
> 	location rightGrip
> 	action startResize
>  }
> 
> well not quite but you get the idea. none of the ob behavior will be
> hardcoded; it will come with a default action file. pwm does this to an
> extent, maybe we can learn tons by looking at that.

Also Waimea.  Waimea also lets you define macros:

  DEF definedTitleActions {
      StartMove     : ButtonPress = Button1,
      EndMoveResize : ButtonRelease = Button1
  }
  window.title {
      definedTitleActions,
      ToggleShade : DoubleClick = Button1
  }


> oh, also, one more reason that actions are cool is because they are one
> codepath for everything. the ONLY time ob will resize a client window is when
> it executes a startResize action. So somehow, a lot of x events will have to
> be dealt with via actions. (And maybe even some signals, like -USR1 will
> execute a Reconfigure action or something.)

HUP already does that, I thought.  I'm not sure how many other things
people can do with signals, exactly, that would be useful in a window
manager...


> so one codepath for all wm<->user things, and one codepath for all event
> handling. really cool stuff, i think.

-- 
| His designs were strictly honourable, as the phrase is: that is,
| to rob a lady of her fortune by way of marriage.
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