[openbox] Some usability comments on chroot keybindings

[Mikael Magnusson]

On Tue, 29 May 2007, Martin Lucina wrote:

> danakj at orodu.net said:
>>> If someone sees a need to keep the current behaviour it could be kept as
>>> an option ("passthrough"?).
>>
>> This actually allows key quoting.  Say you have a vnc window open with
>> Openbox running inside it.  You can enter a chroot in your main
>> session, and have all your key bindings work in the nested session!
>
> Understood, this is very useful.  However, it's not the desired
> behaviour if I'm doing something like this:
>
>  <keybind key="W-m" chroot="true">
>    <keybind key="h">
>      <action name="MoveFromEdgeWest"/>
>    </keybind>
>    <keybind key="j">
>      <action name="MoveFromEdgeSouth"/>
>    </keybind>
>    <keybind key="k">
>      <action name="MoveFromEdgeNorth"/>
>    </keybind>
>    <keybind key="l">
>      <action name="MoveFromEdgeEast"/>
>    </keybind>
>    <keybind key="Escape">
>      <action name="BreakChroot"/>
>    </keybind>
>  </keybind>
>
> In this case I want to enter a "moving this window around" mode, and
> don't want to have to press W-m for each step.  However I don't want any
> extra keys going to the client by accident.
>
> Maybe I'm just being pedantic :-)
>
>> There is a timeout for non-chroot key chains. Chrooted chains were
>> added more or less specifically to avoid the timeout.  Perhaps just
>> making it longer would be good, but I'm not sure about that.
>
> The timeout is useful in the above example.  The timeout is not a
> biggie though, it's being able to disable the passthrough for some
> keychains which I see as more important.
>
> Anyway, the above example with the chroot option is fantastic, now I can
> finally move windows around on my laptop without having to use that
> annoying touchpad.  Now I'm just wondering if there's some even better
> way of combining MoveFromEdge/MoveToEdge into a single intelligent
> action that will do what I want.  More on this later once I can define
> it better.

You could have naked keys for one and C- or something for the other?

> Also, is there such a thing as a ResizeToEdge/MaximizeToEdge action?  I
> can't divulge it from action.h easily and the old config docs are no
> longer on the website.  This would let me do the same thing as above,
> but for resizing windows as well.

GrowToEdge might be what you're looking for, the old docs are still at 
http://icculus.org/openbox/3/docs.php

--
Mikael Magnusson