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flexibeast / ewmctrl

Use wmctrl to manage desktop windows from Emacs
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About wmctrl #1

Open tumashu opened 9 years ago

tumashu commented 9 years ago

It's a great project for emacs user and my concern is that wmctrl does not update many years. Is it unmaintained or not need update?

flexibeast commented 9 years ago

Thank you for your kind words!

Yes, i'm concerned about the lack of activity around wmctrl also, but don't know of any suitable alternative to using it. (xdotool, for example, seems to be similarly unmaintained.) If the Xlib API was available from ELisp, i'd certainly prefer to use that!

mnp commented 9 years ago

Here's an alternative: https://github.com/QBCo/akemi

Also, I suppose http://tomas.styblo.name/wmctrl is GPL so someone could fork if needed and continue maintaining. Are there any issues?

flexibeast commented 9 years ago

@mnp:

akemi looks neat - thanks for bringing it to my attention! However, i don't feel it's suitable at this point. It's new enough that i imagine it's nowhere near as readily available from distro repos as wmctrl is: utilising akemi instead of wmctrl would require users to clone the akemi repo, make sure the relevant libraries dependencies are installed, make sure various build tools are installed (e.g. gcc, make), and then compile and install. Whereas on Debian, for example, one can simply do e.g. aptitude install wmctrl. The same issues apply to the wmutils project, linked to from the akemi page.

If someone was willing to fork and maintain wmctrl, that would be excellent; i'm not really a C programmer, myself, and don't want to commit resources to becoming one. i imagine there are many improvements that could be made to wmctrl - cf. this, for example.

tumashu commented 9 years ago

I find this: ruby-wmctrl

tumashu commented 9 years ago

and this: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/wmctrl

flexibeast commented 9 years ago

@tumashu:

Thanks for looking for alternatives! Howver, ruby-wmctrl not only has the same issues as i mentioned to @mnp re. akemi, but the bundled command-line wrapper around ruby-wmctrl doesn't implement all the functionality of wmctrl:

ruby-wmctrl includes the command "rwmctrl", which imitates the command "wmctrl" but does not implement all functionalities of "wmctrl".

The Python wmctrl is merely a Python wrapper around the wmctrl binary.