several feature suggestion

[Oren Gampel]

Hi Joachim,

> Ok, so there are two problems:
>  1. Plasma desktops also appear as windows, and hence are useless to
> record. This leads to the question: How to detect such windows (without
> adding configuration options and preferably without hard-coding their
> name). Does xprop list anything useful for them? What is their
> _NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE?

I'm afraid
_NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE(ATOM) = _NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE_DESKTOP

but...

>  2. Record the current desktop name (or number). "wmctrl -d" Also works
> here (xmonad), highly increasing the chance of me adding that feature
> :-)

... looks promising. I assume it's not really a 2nd problem but a rout 
for a solution.
"wmctrl is a UNIX/Linux command line tool to interact with an EWMH/NetWM 
compatible X Window Manager." And I did find xmonad docs about 
integration with EWMH (
http://xmonad.org/xmonad-docs/xmonad-contrib/XMonad-Hooks-
EwmhDesktops.html). 

> 
>> Exactly. That was what I used - adding tag Current-Title:$current.title
>> to see the list of titles, and then change the rules accordingly, and
>> than comment out the "debug" tag. A --list-titles flag for a tag would
>> save me from using this debug technique.
> 
> Why not just leave the tag there, i.e. why do you comment it out? My
> vision is that you can have one configuration file for all required
> analysis, and then look at the tags that are of interest at the moment
> (ignoring the others).

I uncomment it because it generates a lot of noise when I'm trying to 
figure out what to filter. It's really a request for the lazy, in case 
you believe that laziness should be rewarded...

>> While I'm at it, I would like to ask for another feature that might be
>> useful to others:
>> 4) Add a --ignore-minor-breaks=Seconds [very bad flag name] to arbtt-
>> stats.
> 
> This is only for the --intervals report, right?
> 
>> I admit that I'm using a 15 sec --sample-rate, which might be short,
>> but there are other things I do that actually need this granularity. On
>> the other hand, for specific tasks, I would like to ignore short breaks
>> of a minute or two. For authoring a technical paper for example, that
>> needs constant dealing with other tools, reading other articles,
>> browsing the web etc, this can be significant.
> 
> I’m not sure if this is the right approach. Ideally, you can configure
> arbtt to detect that you are doing related work. Note that you can match
> on other windows as well, e.g. if you are editing thesis.tex, but the
> active window is your PDF viewer, you can still assign the tag
> "Project:Thesis". Maybe this will close all invalid holes in the report,
> leaving open the “real” holes where you read the arbtt mailing lists
> :-).
> 
> Alternatively, one might be interested in something like „Intervals
> where at least 90% of the time tag foo is set“, which might handle
> interruptions more gracefully and faithfully than a hard timer.
> 
> But in any case such a feature needs a bit of thinking and contemplating
> and brainstorming... :-)

I completely agree. I thought about the 90% path, and few other 
algorithms. Would you mind if I open a separate thread to discuss this?

Oren