Popup with Weekly Agenda?

Popup with Weekly Agenda?

[Karl Maihofer]

Hi,

Tassilo integrated the weekly agenda (as a popup) with the awesome
window manager[1]. So whenever the mouse pointer enters a special region
of the desktop, a popup shows the agenda for the current week and
disappears when the mouse is moved away (Have a look at the very nice
screenshot shown in the article).

I was wondering if anybody could imagine a way to do something similar
using other window managers for X, especially Gnome.

Karl

[1]
http://tsdh.wordpress.com/2009/03/04/integrating-emacs-org-mode-with-the-awesome-window-manager/

Popup with Weekly Agenda?

[Eric S Fraga, Eric S Fraga]

Karl Maihofer writes:
> Hi,
> 
> Tassilo integrated the weekly agenda (as a popup) with the awesome
> window manager[1]. So whenever the mouse pointer enters a special region
> of the desktop, a popup shows the agenda for the current week and
> disappears when the mouse is moved away (Have a look at the very nice
> screenshot shown in the article).
> 
> I was wondering if anybody could imagine a way to do something similar
> using other window managers for X, especially Gnome.

In Gnome, you can use gnome-osd-client to replace the "naughty" bit.
gnome-osd-client actually works with most window managers; I use it
with ratpoison to have emacs appt notifications appear on-screen, as
suggested by Richard Riley.

To replace the lua code which adds font information to the text
generated by org's agenda output, you could use any of the scripting
languages (perl, say).  

Finally, I'm not sure about how to make Gnome's window manager
(enlightenment?) respond to the mouse hovering over any particular
part of the screen but you could easily bind a key to the script which
would invoke the gnome-osd-client command to pop up the agenda
instead.

HTH.

Re: Popup with Weekly Agenda?

[Ian Barton]

> Finally, I'm not sure about how to make Gnome's window manager
> (enlightenment?) respond to the mouse hovering over any particular
> part of the screen but you could easily bind a key to the script which
> would invoke the gnome-osd-client command to pop up the agenda
> instead.
> 
>

Hers is a page that describes using Ubuntu's Notification system: 
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NotificationDevelopmentGuidelines

I'll have a play with this myself this weekend and see if I can come up 
with something.

Ian.

Re: Popup with Weekly Agenda?

[Ian Barton]

>> Hers is a page that describes using Ubuntu's Notification system: 
>> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NotificationDevelopmentGuidelines
>>
>> I'll have a play with this myself this weekend and see if I can come up 
>> with something.
> 
> A more generic approach, along the same lines, could be to use the
> notification system provided by dbus and supported by most window
> managers using the libnotify system (and the notify-send command).
> The only problem with that approach is that libnotify only supports a
> very little bit of formatting (bold, italic, underline but no colour).

You are correct. The new Ubuntu Notify OSD, which uses libnotify, 
doesn't support things like text colour.

I am hacking together something which creates a gtk Tray Icon and uses a 
standard gtk window for the notification. it's basically working, but I 
need to make the gtk window look more like a Notify window and get a 
grip on the rather complex way gtkTextBuffer marks up text.

Ian.

Re: Popup with Weekly Agenda?

[Eric S Fraga, Eric S Fraga]

Ian Barton writes:
> You are correct. The new Ubuntu Notify OSD, which uses libnotify, 
> doesn't support things like text colour.
> 
> I am hacking together something which creates a gtk Tray Icon and uses a 
> standard gtk window for the notification. it's basically working, but I 
> need to make the gtk window look more like a Notify window and get a 
> grip on the rather complex way gtkTextBuffer marks up text.

Another possibility would be to use conky which draws on the root
window directly instead of on top of everything else.  You could have
the agenda constantly displayed then.  Conky does support full
colouring.

Whether this is useful for anybody or not is another story, of
course...

Re: Popup with Weekly Agenda?

[Ian Barton]

>> I am hacking together something which creates a gtk Tray Icon and uses a 
>> standard gtk window for the notification. it's basically working, but I 
>> need to make the gtk window look more like a Notify window and get a 
>> grip on the rather complex way gtkTextBuffer marks up text.
> 
> Another possibility would be to use conky which draws on the root
> window directly instead of on top of everything else.  You could have
> the agenda constantly displayed then.  Conky does support full
> colouring.
> 
> Whether this is useful for anybody or not is another story, of
> course...

I use conky myself, but it's already a bit cluttered with lots of info,
including the status of my MythTV box:)

A pop up window would be useful to me and other family members, who
aren't emacs users.

I now have a working prototype which uses a Tray Icon to display a pop
up window. I abandoned trying to colour text in a gtk TextBuf myself and
went with pygtkcodebuffer, which is a syntax highlighting derivative of
gtkTextBuf. This has the advantage that you can easily define your own
syntax to produce whatever colouring effect takes your fancy.

I'll rewrite my prototype to get rid of all the cruft and put it on
github later this week.

Ian.