Workspace

Each workspace has a management mode that can be tiling, tabbed, vertical-tabbed, fullscreen or float - though there are pluginable tools that can provide others, like autolayout. You can switch these around through the global/workspace/layout path.

On top of that, each workspace can have a background, and a name. The name will be reflected in the workspace indicators as part of the statusbar.

A workspace belongs to a window manager, which in turn is tied to a display. A window manager has access to ten slots, and when switching the active workspace slot to one that has not been used, a new workspace will be created with the default mode controlled by the global/settings/workspaces/default mode path.

If a workspace gets deselected without any windows, name or background set, it will be destroyed by default. To change this behavior, you can look at the global/settings/workspaces/autodelete path.

With multiple displays, you can migrate a workspace to another display via the global/workspace/migrate path. All windows within that workspace will also receive an update with the density, resolution and similar properties so density-aware windows can relayout and update accordingly.

If the backing display is disconnected, orphaned workspaces will be migrated to the next available display and migrate back when the display re-appears. To disable this behavior, change global/settings/workspace/autoadopt.

Window

Window behavior, layout and size vary with the workspace. A window consists of a border area, a border, a canvas, a titlebar and a tag. Internally, more properties are tracked such as type and origin. For tuning the visual properties, see the page on visuals.

The window titlebar can be disabled on a per-window basis (target/titlebar/on,off) or have a default enabled or disabled policy through global/settings/visual/bars/hide titlebar with an optional exception for the float layout mode via the global/settings/workspaces/float/force-titlebar path.

Although the feature has not been UI mapped yet, it is possible to change the buttons that are added as part of the titlebar. By default, the titlebar has no buttons. By changing autorun.lua (user-defined code to run on startup) you can run something like:

    durden_tbar_buttons("left", "#/window/destroy",
        string.char(0xe2) .. string.char(0x9c) .. string.char(0x96));

Which would add an ‘x’ symbol in the left button area for all titlebars. When the button is clicked, the target/window/destroy menu path would be called.

The fill-area contents of the titlebar is also configurable (text to display) via the format string provided in global/settings/visual/bars/titlebar.

Future Changes

• Titlebar button configuration added to menu
• stateful buttons to show current values (e.g. volume or sound mute status)
• Per window or per window-class titlebar custom buttons