[LAU] Qtractor - & friends - ONE WINDOW setup!!

[Yassin Philip]

Guys, I'm really excited, I want to share this with you : I managed to 
solve the biggest ergonomics gripe that I had with Qtractor 
<http://www.rncbc.org/drupal/comment/7175#comment-7175>, and given the 
fact that I live in it, you can imagine my trepidation :p

You see the mixer is a /floating/ window. And while that's fine for a 
lot of people in a lot of use cases, for me, most of the time, it's not. 
I don't like floating windows, for many reasons, and to avoid the 
questioning of my very membership of the troubadour's guild, let's skip 
to the first : Just because ; Please don't waste our time, go play with 
your own windows and float them to your heart's content :/

I basically need to see my mixer at all times. Well no, not at all 
times, in fact most of the time I'm in the timeline, full screen ; But 
when I want to see it, I definitely want to see my timeline /as well/, 
all of it. Very rarely/never do I need to see /just the mixer, full screen/.

Note that I had this issue with basically /every/ horizontal 
timeline-based DAW that I used (Ableton live - up until 7, after that I 
don't know - comes to mind) the only viable alternative being the Ardour 
way, where the selected track/bus can be embedded on the side. I love that.

Add to that the fact that a lot of WMs don't always honor the position 
directives of said floating windows, like typically, in both Unity and 
i3 "default", when one toggles the mixer's display with either the mixer 
button or the F9 shortcut, it springs back in the dead center of the 
screen, no matter where you painstakingly positioned it before. I don't 
know about you, but grabbing my mouse to constantly resize a window /the 
same way every time/ simply ruins my joie de vivre. Oh, I'm sure in Kwin 
it's pixel perfect ;) back to our overlapping problem : I want to see my 
mixer, but I also want to see ALL my tracks by scrolling 
vertically/zooming in the timeline. I also, when I open a plugin GUI, or 
more than one for that matter, dont want it/them to get in the way.

And finally, according to recent studies floating windows are bad for 
the ozone layer. If you ask me for an interview, that's what I'll say :)

Enter i3 <https://i3wm.org/>. This "tiling" WM is quite popular, it's 
light, configurable, and very well documented. I cannot emphasize 
"light" enough : Try it on this old laptop that struggles more at each 
Debian iteration. The idea is that no window overlap/float, except for, 
well, floating windows. Obvious ones, file copy dialogs, that sort of 
things. And Qtractor's Mixer is, by default, in this category, so I 
struggled a bit to get to what I want, but I finally did it (and missed 
a heartbeat) look:

https://youtu.be/TeYHkjlHtTg
https://youtu.be/sTKr_G2AnKQ

It's a directive in i3 config file, that targets this specific window 
based on its class and name, discovered using the xprop command. That 
means that under this regime, it will *never* float again.

for_window [class="Qtractor" instance="Mixer - Qtractor"] floating disable

One can go further and specify precise sizes, positions and layouts, and 
put them in the config file, and switch to them on-the-fly. Oh, and of 
course everything can be resized/re-positioned with the keyboard. i3, by 
default, uses the super (win logo) key in a very elegant, mnemonically 
and unobtrusive way. Fantastic, told ya.

Now let me tell you, the real fun begins. No window overlap, no more 
"always on top" hacks, or putting down the guitar pick to fiddle with 
the (*$- at +°#¤!) mouse ; Everything respond at the touch of a key, this 
is per-fick :) cheers everybody. Programmers, musicians, carpenters and 
motocyclists, lovers, friends, acquaintances, etc. and /of course/ (duh) 
every combination of it :)


yPhil

-- 
Yassin "xaccrocheur" Philip
http://yassinphilip.bitbucket.org

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