I’ve been hacking on a small panel for my current desktop environment— I’ve switched to using a really minimal no-frills environment consisting of openbox-3 and a small dock/notification area, since I was getting antsy about the GNOME 2 panel. I only wanted a simple list of open windows on a particular desktop and a clock, and I didn’t need too much chrome on that. I couldn’t quite set up the GNOME 2 panel to not use buttons or alternatively maximize the space for window title text, so I decided to simply ditch the panel altogether.
So, enter fsp-h. The hacked version of F’ng Small Panel is what I needed. Plus, to get the minimal window footprint needed, I added in a Openbox theme designed for people who don’t need the titlebar text.
As you can see, I’ve been trying to get as close to my old Ion3 environment as possible, and I think I’ve gotten close enough. I hacked in support for quick window switching, ala ion3, where hitting ‘W-1’ will switch to the first window on the desktop, hitting ‘W-2’ will switch to the second, etc. I also got some 64-bit issues cleared up (the original code was built on 32-bit, and icons were broken on 64-bit).
All in all, I think I’m getting to like this. Plus, I’m using GNOME Do for quick opens etc., as well as for doing Ion3’s quick SSH (which I use to open a terminal to SSH to hosts).
Previously: Emacs as a Java IDE