Description

"Mouseless navigation". Keyboard navigation and window tiling for Linux desktop.

Winterreise installs two programs, wint and winj.

The first program, winj, allows to use keyboard to switch between windows and workspaces. It shows a menu with the colored list of windows, marked by letters a-z. Colors are configurable. Pressing the key a-z "teleports" to that window. Pressing the space bar brings up the previous window. Pressing 1-9 "teleports" to the corresponding workspace.

The second program, wint, allows to tile windows using predefined tiling schemes.

I use patterns from colourlovers.com for the window background:

Installation

Need to install Cargo, and some system libraries:

sudo apt-get install build-essential libxcb-ewmh-dev libxcb-icccm4-dev x11-utils libgtk-3-dev libgdk-pixbuf-2.0-dev libatk1.0-dev libpango1.0-dev libcairo-dev libglib2.0-dev

then build and install:

cargo install --path .

Then copy config:

mkdir  ~/.config/winterreise
cp  config/*  ~/.config/winterreise/

The cargo install installs two programs:

1. wint for tiling windows

2. winj for jumping between windows

They are installed into ~/.cargo/bin/ (which was added to PATH when cargo was installed).

Use

Window tiling

There is a tiling description file ~/.config/winterreise/tilings.xml. Each "geometry" is of the form x,y,width,height where x,y are the coordinates of the top left corner of the window.

Execution of the command wint brings up a dialog window containing:

1. A char-hinted list of windows on the current desktop

2. A command line at the bottom

In the command line, type the description of the desired layout. For example, if window charhinted a should be laid out as tex, and window c as pdf, type:

atex cpdf

and press Enter. (Notice that the charhint is followed immediately by the name of the tiling model defined in tilings.xml.)

Desktop navigation

Execute:

winj -h

for help...

The colors of the buttons are determined by the CSS file ~/.config/winterreise/style.css. The style classes listed in that file follow the pattern: wbtn_CLASSNAME. If CLASSNAME contains a dot, replace it with underscore:

org.inkscape.Inkscape -> wbtn_org_inkscape_Inkscape

How to learn the CLASSNAME of an application

Run the command:

xprop WM_CLASS

The mouse cursor will become a cross. Click on the window in question. The output will be something like:

WM_CLASS(STRING) = "xterm", "UXTerm"

Notice that there are two values: "xterm" and "UXTerm" The first one, "xterm", is called res_name , while the second ("UXTerm") is called res_class. (Together they form a struct XClassHint of the xlib library.)

Our winj looks at res_name. It ignores res_class.

Using xdotool to set WM_CLASS of a window

The res_name of a window is typically hard-coded in the application, and sometimes it is desirable to change it.

A program called xdotool allows to change the res_name of any window. It is done in two steps. The first step is to execute:

xdotool  search --pid   $WINDOW_PID

where $WINDOW_PID is the process ID of the process which owns the window. The result will be a window code (or a list of codes, if there are several windows). Let us call it $WINDOW_CODE. Then second step is to execute:

xdotool  set_window --classname NEWNAME  $WINDOW_CODE

where NEWNAME is the res_name we want.

Configuring keyboard shortcuts with xbindkeys

These lines in ~/.xbindkeysrc :

#winj
"winj >>/tmp/winterreise.log 2>&1"
    m:0x40 + c:45
    Mod4 + k

#winj-current
"winj -c >>/tmp/winterreise.log 2>&1"
    m:0x40 + c:44
    Mod4 + j

#tile
"wint"
    m:0x40 + c:28
    Mod4 + t

confugure keyboard shortcuts: Super+k and Super+j for winj, and Super+t for wint.