[Xmonad] darcs patch: first shot at a floating layer

[Bruce Stephens]

dons at cse.unsw.edu.au (Donald Bruce Stewart) writes:

[...]

> In fact, this is really nice! Great work Jason. This is very exciting:
> it makes some apps (gimp!) a lot more usable.

I agree.  Transient frames work nicely.  More nicely than with ion3,
actually (in ion3 I think there's only one floating layer, so
transients were visible in all workspaces which is often irritating).

It makes using things like gkrellm possible: I can start it, and then
conveniently float it somewhere out of the way.  On the other hand,
for things like gkrellm, I really *want* that to remain visible when I
switch workspaces.

Maybe there's a place for a per-screen decoration layer, always
visible, in which I can stick clocks, status bars, GNOME panels, etc.?
Hmm, maybe just things that just display information (rather than
interact)?  (And then maybe I could use xcompmgr or something to make
them translucent?)

Another (much more trivial) decoration I'd like is the number of the
workspace.  I guess that could use the per-workspace floating layer.
(I imagine that as a translucent number in a corner, but I guess it
could equally be opaque.  For preference it wouldn't take
focus---actually, it would be nice to be able to have some clients not
participate in focus---I don't want to type things into gkrellm, for
example.)

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