Martin Geisler Online

E17 — the next version of the classic [Enlightenment][] window manager — is getting better and better each day, and it’s fun to hack! Not that I’ve done anything ground-breaking with it, but it’s fun nonetheless.

After my initial success with the keyboard move/resize patch I sat down and wrote a Danish translation for E17. This doesn’t really count at coding, except that I also changed the Autoconf and Automake macros used so that one no longer has to edit both configure.in and po/Makefile.am when adding new translations. Again, it’s nothing deep, but it’s nice to be able to contribute a little here and there. And by the way, if someone has any suggestions for the Danish translation then please send them my way… I have no clue how to translate several of the terms used in a window manager, for example, what Danish word would you translate ‘Shade’ into?

Danish or not — if you’re running Linux, then you should definitely try downloading Enlightenment (do a [CVS][] checkout of e17/libs and e17/apps) and build it. Everything builds and installs very nicely without requiring root access when you use ./autogen.sh --prefix=~/opt or similar. If you don’t want to bother compiling E17 yourself, then you can get packages for [Debian][] here. I don’t know about packages for other distributions, but try checking http://get-e.org/.

Of course something would be wrong if I didn’t play with my computer now that I finally am able to do it with good conscience :-)

I’m now playing with [PEL][], I want to make an online Exif editor where you can submit your image and then change the Exif information at will. It will take some time, but I think it will be a nice demo of what PEL can do. A long the way I hope to be able to improve PEL here and there when I figure out what works and what doesn’t. The funny thing about PEL is that I have only been using it in command-line [PHP][] scripts, but never before on a webpage. So I might have missed some things when I made it — time and experience will tell.

What have I done after my last exam? Nothing much! :-)

So, for example, yesterday Stéphanie and I watched the last hour or so of Queen of the Damned together… on a French channel! Vampire movies can be a bit of fun, and I’ve seen a fair number of episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but I’ve never before seen vampires speak French.

The problem is that I’ve never had any French lessons in school, so the language is utterly and completely nonsense to me. I understand when they say “Oui” or “No”, but that’s about it.

So Stéphanie translated for me, but of course that doesn’t really give the same scary feeling like the original :-) And it didn’t help either that neither of us had seen the first hour of the movie, so we probably missed the finer details in the plot. Not that I think the movie had a huge plot, but anyway… :-)

I’ve added a bunch of XML-RPC services for [WordPress][] to ping when I make new content here. Until now I’ve just been using the default Ping-O-Matic server which sends my pings along to 12 other services — I now have 28 more services on my list to ping!

I wonder how long it’s going to post something now… I’ll be able to tell in a second when I post this :-)

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!” :-)