Martin Geisler Online

I’ve been playing with E17 lately — the next version of the Enlightenment window manager — and it’s coming along very quickly. A couple of months ago you could compile it and run it, but nothing fancy would happen. Windows could be moved around, they could be minimized and maximized but that was about it.

Things have changed a lot since then — E17 has now reached level of functionality that makes it very usuable and of course it’s looking great! This has always been the one of the unique features of Enlightenment: they make their stuff look good. And now that we have functionality to back the eye-candy we actually have something which isn’t just a tech-demo! :-)

Eh… about the code… Lately we’ve seen the focus policies from E16 being ported and a set of key- and mouse-bindings have been introduced, all changable via IPC. My patch adds three new actions to the list: move_relative, move_absolute, and resize. After binding those to suitable keys you’ll be able to move and resize your windows using the keyboard only.

After I began using Fluxbox some time ago I realized that I couldn’t live without keyboard control over my windows, so now we have it in Enlightenment too. In my setup I’ve bound the actions as follows (this is a shell script):

er=enlightenment_remote
$er -binding-key-add ANY Left  'SHIFT|CTRL|ALT' 0 'move_absolute' '+0 *'
$er -binding-key-add ANY Right 'SHIFT|CTRL|ALT' 0 'move_absolute' '-0 *'
$er -binding-key-add ANY Up    'SHIFT|CTRL|ALT' 0 'move_absolute' '* +0'
$er -binding-key-add ANY Down  'SHIFT|CTRL|ALT' 0 'move_absolute' '* -0'
$er -binding-key-add ANY Left  'CTRL|ALT' 0 'move_relative' '-20 0'
$er -binding-key-add ANY Right 'CTRL|ALT' 0 'move_relative' '+20 0'
$er -binding-key-add ANY Up    'CTRL|ALT' 0 'move_relative' '0 -20'
$er -binding-key-add ANY Down  'CTRL|ALT' 0 'move_relative' '0 +20'
$er -binding-key-add ANY Left  'SHIFT|ALT' 0 'resize' '-20 0'
$er -binding-key-add ANY Right 'SHIFT|ALT' 0 'resize' '+20 0'
$er -binding-key-add ANY Up    'SHIFT|ALT' 0 'resize' '0 -20'
$er -binding-key-add ANY Down  'SHIFT|ALT' 0 'resize' '0 +20'

This works very well for me, especially the Shift-Control-Alt-⟨dir⟩ key-combo which I use for quickly pushing windows out of the way. The code is now in CVS even, so if you’re living on the bleeding edge, then do a checkout and give it a try!

Oh, just another thing: when I told Stéphanie about my new interest in Enlightenment she simply replied: “Enlightenment is over… it was something that happened back in the 17 hundreds… you’re so old-fashioned!” :-)