Rethinking global shortcuts

[Mark]

On Sat, Feb 9, 2013 at 12:06 PM, Martin Gräßlin <mgraesslin at kde.org> wrote:
> On Friday 08 February 2013 22:25:13 Mark wrote:
>> On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 5:56 PM, Sebastian Kügler <sebas at kde.org> wrote:
>> > On Thursday, February 07, 2013 14:33:47 Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
>> >> the "start other window manager" feature(/bug? ;)
>> >
>> > In the new world, this might be an old concept that we don't have to drag
>> > over. The traditional need for this will probably be mostly gone.
>> >
>> > If we want to remove it, the move to Wayland would be a good opportunity.
>>
>> I'd prefer to stick to the "old concept".
> Fact is that it won't be possible in the Wayland world. Why? With which
> compositor would you want to exchange KWin in a Wayland world?
> * Compiz? Ubuntu is apparently working on an own Windowing System which is
> neither X nor Wayland
> * Mutter? Unlikely it will ever work with anything except GNOME Shell
> * Weston? Possible, but it's also containing a desktop shell and will Weston
> provide features needed by Plasma? Will they implement features we will need?
> Unlikely (why should they add support for a desktop shell which has it's own
> compositor).
> * Expecting another Wayland compositor? I don't

Well, openbox used to work quite well. Though that's several years ago
since i last used it with KDE. Then again, i'd prefer to not exclude
others. Global shortcuts should - imho - not be in kwin. Just some "qt
only daemon" should be used for that. Then kwin should look into that
daemon and register the keys it wants to have registered. Other apps
should do the same.

That "communication" should happen either through dbus (thus the "qt
only daemon" will have a dbus dependency) or there should be a
C/C++/Qt API so that both KDE and Gnome apps can make use of it.

A window manager should in my opinion do just that, manage windows. It
has no business in managing global shortcut keys. Or is my logic
flawed? If so, please do correct me.