Features

Tray icons

Tray icons are not showing up in the statusbar.

If you would care to follow the instructions for reporting bugs, you would most likely notice that ditching Gnome solves the problem. Ion does not and will not support the ultra-complicated wheel-reinventing FDO/Gnome tray specification (and in particular the result of illiteracy and a very serious case of NIH syndrome or brain damage: XEmbed). Only the simpler old KDE protocol and the Window Maker dockapp protocol are supported. Other windows can be redirected into the statusbar with winprops, as instructed in the documentation. However, the FDO/Gnome crap completely bypasses the usual window management protocols, and hence Ion is completely unaware of it. If you absolutely want to run Gnome crap, there exist external programs for that.

Xinerama

Xinerama this, Xinerama that, baawaawaa!!

Too bad. I'm not going to waste my time rubbing your unecological penis enlargement.

However, unlike the crap that is typically to be expected from FOSS, Ion is dynamically modular. So use an internet search engine to find out what others have managed to come up for you and your conspicuous consumer brethren. Remember that any third party modules will void support.

Also note that contrary to popular myth, Xinerama does not equal multihead. X has supported multihead since ages, and Ion does support this plain old X multihead (with separate root windows for each screen), because it is trivial to do so, unlike hacky Xinerama. You could even run a different window manager for each screen under plain old X multihead. All that Xinerama offers and the former doesn't, is windows spanning multiple screens, and moving windows between screens. The former is quite pointless: if your physical screens really merge that well, why do you need to consider them separate at all? That is, what do you need Xinerama support for? As for window migration, it isn't a big issue in applications like TV-out. (It is also only artificially restricted in plain old X multihead, which would've been trivial to extend with that support if people weren't so intent on pushing another ugly hack instead…)

SSH ports

Can Ion's (F4) SSH query complete the port or username I use on a host?

Just use ~/.ssh/config to configure SSH to always use those username and port by default:

    Host foobar
    User bazquk
    Port 1234

Mouse support

Will Ion support the mouse?

It does.

EWMH support

How well does Ion support Extended WM Hints/KDE/Gnome?

See this posting to the Ion mailing list.

Blurred fonts

Does Ion support anti-aliased fonts/Xft?

No. Antialiasing is an ugly self-defeating kludge, as is subpixel placement. The only way screens can convey subpixel resolution information in a manner that doesn't make the characters look like having been smeared with mud, is for the screen resolution to be so huge that you can not pinpoint individual pixels without a magnifier. Present technology is not even close to that kind of resolutions, which would defeat the purpose of these kludges. And yet fascist core software – an industry-wide trend – such as Xft/fontconfig are shipped for such end-of-the-rainbow technology, without regard for the present – without regard for differing tastes, oppressing users who do not like their fonts blurred.

I will not consider supporting Xft/fontconfig and blurred fonts in Ion until clear, crisp unblurred fonts and bitmap fonts can easily be enabled on all significant distributions from the command line (without root access, without touching XML with even a kilometre long stick, and without manually compiling a version that includes the bytecode interpreter, the autohinter being a ridiculous joke). Most likely this will never happen, given the woeful state of FOSS.

I will also not provide support for versions of Ion that have been corrupted with support for such things as Xft/fontconfig, and such versions may not be distributed as “Ion”.

Hyped technology

Why doesn't it use/support <insert latest hyped technology here>?

See the FAQ item on The looks.

Custom tricks

How can I have Ion perform this particular action I have in mind?

Ion2 and Ion3: The Configuration manual should help you find a solution to your problem. Use the Index or List of functions to search for what you have in mind.

Ion1: Read doc/functions.txt carefully. If what you have in mind is not found there, it probably isn't possible in that version of Ion.

Nested workspaces

It would be nice to be able to nest a “floating workspace” within a tiled frame.

Ion can do this, and a lot more! There are very few limits in what kind of objects can be placed within others. To create a nested group with an “empty” layout, you can enter the following code in the Mod1+F3 (in the default bindings setup) Lua code query:

_:attach_new({type="WGroupWS"})

(In the Lua code query, “_” is a reference to the frame in which the query was opened.)

The looks

Why is it so ugly?

a) It is not. Are you sure you're not on a bad trip from the aqua in teletubbyland?

b) It is “research code”, and as there are far more interesting problems to solve than designing graphical styles (or supporting whatever technologies are currently in fashion), those are what must be tackled given the meager resources available to the project. You are free to contribute, though.

That said, Ion's looks could be improved, but not by heading where the rest of the world seems to be heading.

Shaped windows

Will Ion support shaped and/or borderless windows on floating frame workspaces?

Absolutely not. It is the window manager's job to manage and decorate windows in a consistent manner, not the application's. All those shaped and skinned multimedia players that want to override the window manager are brain-damaged usability hindrances and should not be used by anyone.

Feature requests

I want a feature in Ion. Will it be implemented?

The best way to get your wanted feature in Ion is to first ask if I'm willing to include it and then write a patch yourself – unless the feature is simple enough so that I can write it in a few minutes. “Big” features will almost always be requested to be implemented as modules if at all possible.

Sticky windows

I want my system monitoring programs visible on all workspaces. Will Ion support sticky windows? Will there be a dock?

The short answer to sticky windows is: no, they do not suit the tiled workspace model. It is, however, technically possibly to have detached (“floating”) sticky windows with some scripting in versions of Ion3 onwards from late 2006. Whether there will be better integrated support, seems unlikely.

There is a dock module, that can work in both stays-on-top “floating” mode, and in embedded mode, adapting to the layout of a tiled workspace. The adaptive mode is mutually exclusive with the statusbar.