mgr's weblog

A good ten month ago I switched away from a full desktop environment being finally tired enough that user software gets more and ever more features and tries to anticipate more and more what I might want but in the end my own computer never actually does what I want and only that. PulseAudio being the most dreaded example of a piece of code that gets more, more and more magic and complexity and in the end it never does what you actually want while at the same time telling it to do so got completely impossible because of many layers of abstractions and magic. PulseAudio has a lot of "rules", "profiles", "device intended roles", "autodetecting", "automatic setup and routing" and "other housekeeping actions". Look at this article PulseAudio under the hood by Victor Gaydov (which is also the source of the terms I just quoted): It has 174 occurrences of words starting with "auto-": automatically – 106, automatic – 27, autoload – 16, autospawn – 14, autodetect – 4, autoexit – 2, automate – 2, auto timing – 1, auto switch – 1, and once "magically" when it is even too much for the author.

So, more control and less clutter instead. After years again I use just a good old window manager, individual programs, and got rid of PulseAudio.

I switched to StumpWM which is written in Common Lisp. It is easy to modify and try stuff. While it's running. I have it run Slime so that I can connect to it from Emacs and hack stuff that is missing. From time to time I got StumpWM hanging while hacking, so I added a signal handler for POSIX signal SIGHUP to force a hard stumpwm restart. (There is a new version of that signal handler without the CFFI dependency but that pull request is not merged yet.) When I did something stupid I switch to a console, fire a killall -HUP stumpwm to have it reset hard. Since then I haven't lost a X11 session even while changing quite a bit. [[rss-mark]]

Right away I wrote some minimalistic modules to control audio volume (stump-volume-control) and to play internet radio stations (stump-radio). They put the multimedia keys or other extra keys on most keyboards to use. Both modules have also been added to stumpwm-contrib.

Note that StumpWM is a tiling window manager and keyboard driven. So no windows with decorations, just frames. But if you really want a window, you can call FLOAT-THIS and the current frame turns into a window. Or you can make a floating group (aka virtual desktop) with GNEW-FLOAT and all windows in that group are actual windows.

Recently I got a new wide 34″ screen with a resolution of 3440x1440 pixels. I noticed that just splitting the screen space vertically into two frames makes the text appear either too far left or too much on the right, and also both are too big. There is VSPLIT-EQUALLY but with the screen equally divided into three columns, the main program in the middle is too narrow.

I want the whole thing more adapted to my taste. To do so I just wrote this little function and command:

(defun vsplit-three* (&key (ratio .3) (group (current-group)) (dir :column))
  (let* ((split-1 (- 1 ratio))
         (split-2 (* ratio (/ 1 split-1))))
    (only)
    (stumpwm::split-frame-in-dir group dir split-1)
    (stumpwm::split-frame-in-dir group dir split-2)
    ratio))
 
(defcommand (vsplit-three stumpwm::tile-group) (&optional (ratio ".3"))
    (:string)
  (vsplit-three* :ratio (read-from-string ratio)))
 
(define-key *root-map* (kbd "O") "vsplit-three")

When called with a default ratio of 3/10 it makes two small frames left and right that take 30 % of the total screen real estate and a middle frame that gets the remaining 40 %. This seems to be good for generic use. A value of 0.27 seems to be better for coding with a slightly bigger main window. And for the web browsing group, I rather have it 25 % – 50 % – 25 % right now.

Update 20240322: Fixed the display of stars in the source code snippet

Thank you Tim Macdonald, for pointing out that the stars were not displayed in the source code of vsplit-three* and vsplit-three above. I made extra sure that the source code is now shown correctly.

Glad you like the function and thanks for your mail!