Durden 0.6 Released

Hot on the heels of the recent Arcan release, it is also time for a release to our reference desktop environment ‘Durden‘.

To refresh memory somewhat, the closest valid comparison is probably the venerable AwesomeWM – but there is quite a lot more to it in Durden. It has been my daily driver for around 5 years now and implements all popular window management styles, and some unique ones.

During this time, it has been used to drive development of Arcan itself — but that will start to wind down now as there is little need for more major features. Instead updates will mainly be improvements to the existing ones before we can safely go 1.0. The two other projects, Safespaces and [Undisclosed], will take its place in helping the engine reach new heights.

Durden has an unusual way of putting a desktop together where everything is structured as a file-system and reconfigurable at run-time with results immediately visible:

/global/workspace/background/color=127,0,0
/windows/type/terminal/input/mouse/click=0.1,0.1
/target/share/remoting/passive/vnc=5900:guest

This filesystem can be accessed through build-in HUD and popup menus, as well as externally controlled through a unix socket. Through the arcan-cfgfs tool it can even be mounted as a FUSE-file system.

All higher level UI primitives — no matter if it is decoration buttons, keybindings, statusbar and so on are simply references paths in this file system. There is over 600 such paths at the moment.

You can easily extend or ‘slim it down’ by adding or removing ‘tools’ scripts and ‘widgets’ scripts (for the HUD).

We are at the point where many traditional X window managers styles can be transferred through scripts that translate your old dot files into paths that can be run as schemes (atomic set of paths).

If you are interested in helping out with developing such translation scripts, get in contact.

Here is a link to the full Changelog. The rest of the post will describe some of the major changes but since most of them are not particularly visual, videos will be used more sparingly this time around.

Core / Input

Shutdown has received a new important option, ‘silent’. This will still cause a shutdown of Durden but the clients will treat it as if the connection has crashed and enter a sleep-reconnect cycle. Whenever you start Durden again, the clients should come back as if nothing happened.

Touch – This layer has been refactored to make it much easier to add or modify classifiers. New classifiers have been added for (relative mouse, touch-fit and touch-scaled).

More controls have been added to the touchscreen and trackpad input handler through /global/input/touch for runtime tuning, but many more controls still exist as part of the device profiles (see devmaps/touch/…). Touch device profiles have received more options and bindable gestures, as well as different handling for ‘enter n-finger drag’ versus ‘step n-finger drag’.

Rotary – Through /global/input/rotary and devmaps/rotary/… you can now control binding and mapping for devices like the Surface Dial and GriffinPower Mate. These are great alternatives to the mouse wheel for actions like scrolling. This tool also has basic experimental support for 3D mice, though those are much more complex.

New Tools

As always, we have some new tools:

streamdeck – This is a complex one. There is a separate article on the inner workings of it (Interfacing with a ‘Stream Deck’ Device). This video demos it:

showing off a stream deck working with Durden

This is not strictly limited to this narrow class of devices. The tool can be used to provide any display+input device pair to run as a ‘minimap’ screen, or integrate with wm- defined properties like titlebar buttons (in the video), client announced custom keys, workspace and window miniatures, custom bindings and so on.

Popup – This tool allows you to spawn either a custom menu (defined in the devmaps/menus folder) or any subtree of the normal file-system as a popup. Either tied to another UI component or relative to the current known cursor position. The video below shows how they are mapped to parts of the statusbar and titlebar.

Todo – This is a simple task tracker / helper that can be found under /global/tools/todo. You set a task group, add some tasks with a shortname and description and activate. A task is picked at random and appears as a statusbar button. Click on it to postpone or mark for completion and you get a new one, and so on. The best use of this tool is integration with your other ticketing systems if you, like me, work on many projects and sometimes have a tough time choosing what to focus on.

Tracing – This is simply a debug assistant that will merge the engine tracing facility in Arcan with all the logging going on in Durden into one coherent timeline. Saves to the about:// trace format in Chrome or used through a converter with the much better Tracy.

Extbtn – The ‘external button’ tool was also covered in part by another article (Another low-level Arcan client: A tray icon handler). It allows you to map external clients as icon providers into the statusbar tray. This is also a way to mix the status bar contents with multiple external ‘bar-tools’. The tool inside the Arcan source repository has some helper scripts for doing so using the lemon-bar protocol.

This video is from that article, showing off attaching a terminal emulator as well as Xorg with wmaker as a tray icon popup.

Autostart –This tool allows you to define, view and modify paths that will run on startup or reset.

UI Components

HUD – The built-in HUD file browser now triggers on clients (on user input) requests universal save/load, and sorting / searching received a ‘fuzzy matching’ mode (thanks to Cipharus). By typing ‘%’ into the HUD command line you can switch sorting mode, where fuzzy_relevance is a new entry.

Colour-Picker Widget – HUD settings that request an input colour, such as setting the background to a fix colour, will now popup several different palettes or reference image to pick from. In the video below you can see it being used to set a single colour wallpaper.

Statusbar – The popup tool now gets mapped to custom menus for workspace- switching buttons when right-clicking. This also applies to window titlebar. Display buttons are now dynamically added on display hotplug for quicker switching or migrating windows by drag-and-drop.

If window titlebars are marked as hidden due to client-side decorations, or default- setting them to off, they can now be set to ‘merge’ into the center-fill area of the statusbar instead – saving precious vertical space.

Window Management

Mouse controls have been added to the tiling window management modes. This means that you can re-organise / swap / migrate and so on by drag-and-dropping, with a live preview as to where in the hierarchy they will attach. The video below shows that in action:

A ‘column-‘ tab mode has been added that dedicates a side column for each ‘window as tab’.

The previous ‘CLI group’ mode of handling new connections have been re-written in favour of a new swallowing mode (where a window can share the hierarchy spot of another, swapable). It is more robust than the previous tactic, but currently more limited when dealing with multiple clients.

The option for controlling which workspace new clients spawn on has also been added, along with the (tiling) option of having subwindows spawn as children to their parent window.

Visual / Accessibility

There is now a shared core for caching, loading and generating non-textual icons. Before all icons were picked from a font file, but can now be picked from pre-rastered sources or shaders, and then resampled for the target display output density it is being used on.

The global/displays/<display or current> path has received a ‘zoom’ group that allows you to set or step per-screen magnification around a specific region or relative to the cursor.

Multiple UI components now have optional shadow controls. /global/settings/visual/shadow allows for enabling/disabling the effect, adjusting size, colour and intensity and so on.

The flair – tool has received an effect category for window selection, with a ‘shake’ or ‘flash’ option included.

An ‘invert light’ (color preserving) shader has been added to the collection that can be applied per window, see target/video/shaders.

Durden 0.6 Released