We also wanted to perform a controlled experiment comparing the selection time and error rate of pie menus and linear menus, so I needed to program the window manager to administer the experiment, define and randomize the menus, prompt the user to select from pie and linear menus, time the menu selections, report the statistics, etc.
Xmenu similar code#
I wanted to experiment with different styles of menu tracking, mouse ahead, display pre-emption, feedback, screen edge handling, rolling between pie menus and linear menus, invoking window management commands, and stuff like that, and uwm's C code was not very flexible in that regard. Because a window manager could really benefit from pie menus: lots of the commands are spatially oriented and can be arranged in appropriate mnemonic directions, and they have a fixed set of common window management commands that can be thoughtfully arranged into a set of efficient pie menus, as well as a menu definition language to enable users to create custom menus for running apps, connecting with remote hosts, etc. So I adapted the "uwm" window manager to support pie menus, so you could define your own pie menus and linear menus in your.
And once you have menus, you need a way to make selecting their items actually do something! There was a cheezy little library called "XMenu" that was intended for other programs to use to make menus, which I adapted for pie menus, but no programs actually used it, and it was not very configurable (no menu definition language, just an api), plus its model and api was not well suited for pie menus. When I started hacking X10, I wanted to implement pie menus for it. There are a lot of good reasons to have a scriptable window manager, with a scripting language tightly integrated with the window system.
X-Windows is a dead end (and has been for a long time), and X window managers are as complex and dug into a pit of pointless complexity as the Space Shuttle.
0 kommentar(er)
