Added secret "Beam To tile" API

[NewMountain]

Hi @domferr 👋 I'm the person who filed #236

I figured rather than just add a request for something I wanted that maybe you didn't, I'd at least put up a working implementation. I am using this right now and this combined with your excellent work is perfection!

If you find anything in here useful, please use it. If you see value in this and want me to push it further, or in a different direction, let me know.

If you think this is an abomination, I will close this and apologize 😉

BTW. To show you my exact use case (give it a try).

My layout.json

[
    {
        "id": "thirdLeft",
        "tiles": [
            {
                "x": 0,
                "y": 0,
                "width": 0.30895601483836777,
                "height": 1,
                "groups": [
                    1
                ]
            },
            {
                "x": 0.30895601483836777,
                "y": 0,
                "width": 0.6910439851616308,
                "height": 1,
                "groups": [
                    1
                ]
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "id": "thirdRight",
        "tiles": [
            {
                "x": 0,
                "y": 0,
                "width": 0.6910439851616322,
                "height": 1,
                "groups": [
                    1
                ]
            },
            {
                "x": 0.6910439851616322,
                "y": 0,
                "width": 0.30895601483836777,
                "height": 1,
                "groups": [
                    1
                ]
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "id": "evenThirds",
        "tiles": [
            {
                "x": 0,
                "y": 0,
                "width": 0.30895601483836777,
                "height": 0.5,
                "groups": [
                    1,
                    4
                ]
            },
            {
                "x": 0,
                "y": 0.5,
                "width": 0.30895601483836777,
                "height": 0.4999999999999994,
                "groups": [
                    4,
                    1
                ]
            },
            {
                "x": 0.30895601483836777,
                "y": 0,
                "width": 0.38208797032326447,
                "height": 1,
                "groups": [
                    2,
                    1
                ]
            },
            {
                "x": 0.6910439851616322,
                "y": 0,
                "width": 0.30895601483836904,
                "height": 0.5,
                "groups": [
                    3,
                    2
                ]
            },
            {
                "x": 0.6910439851616322,
                "y": 0.5,
                "width": 0.30895601483836904,
                "height": 0.5,
                "groups": [
                    3,
                    2
                ]
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "id": "mainScreen",
        "tiles": [
            {
                "x": 0,
                "y": 0,
                "width": 0.05511393746687864,
                "height": 1,
                "groups": [
                    1
                ]
            },
            {
                "x": 0.05511393746687864,
                "y": 0,
                "width": 0.9030206677265501,
                "height": 0.08834586466165413,
                "groups": [
                    2,
                    3,
                    1
                ]
            },
            {
                "x": 0.05511393746687864,
                "y": 0.08834586466165413,
                "width": 0.9030206677265501,
                "height": 0.8402255639097744,
                "groups": [
                    3,
                    2,
                    4,
                    1
                ]
            },
            {
                "x": 0.05511393746687864,
                "y": 0.9285714285714286,
                "width": 0.9030206677265501,
                "height": 0.0714285714285714,
                "groups": [
                    4,
                    2,
                    1
                ]
            },
            {
                "x": 0.9581346051934287,
                "y": 0,
                "width": 0.041865394806571365,
                "height": 1,
                "groups": [
                    2
                ]
            }
        ]
    }
]

and my hotkeys.json (import under tiling shell cog between layout and keybindings section)

{
    "1": {
        "layoutId": "thirdLeft",
        "tileIndex": 0,
        "binding": "<Control><Shift>1"
    },
    "2": {
        "layoutId": "evenThirds",
        "tileIndex": 0,
        "binding": "<Control><Shift>2"
    },
    "3": {
        "layoutId": "evenThirds",
        "tileIndex": 1,
        "binding": "<Control><Shift>3"
    },
    "4": {
        "layoutId": "thirdRight",
        "tileIndex": 0,
        "binding": "<Control><Shift>4"
    },
    "5": {
        "layoutId": "evenThirds",
        "tileIndex": 2,
        "binding": "<Control><Shift>5"
    },
    "6": {
        "layoutId": "mainScreen",
        "tileIndex": 2,
        "binding": "<Control><Shift>6"
    },
    "7": {
        "layoutId": "thirdLeft",
        "tileIndex": 1,
        "binding": "<Control><Shift>7"
    },
    "8": {
        "layoutId": "evenThirds",
        "tileIndex": 4,
        "binding": "<Control><Shift>8"
    },
    "9": {
        "layoutId": "evenThirds",
        "tileIndex": 3,
        "binding": "<Control><Shift>9"
    },
    "0": {
        "layoutId": "thirdRight",
        "tileIndex": 1,
        "binding": "<Control><Shift>0"
    }
}

Feel free to adjust the keybindings, but I cycled through ctrl+shift+1..0 and it bounced to all the places I wanted it to go.

[domferr]

Hey thank you for all of this! I believe this is a nice solution. As you probably noticed, with Tiling Shell I heavily focus on providing the greatest user experience ever. Having that in mind, I'd like to give you my comments about this. To publish this feature on large scale, delivering it to everybody we should:

• have a graphical way to set up keybindings. Like other Tiling Shell's features, such way must be easy to be used even by people not proficient to Linux (e.g newcomers and non devs). The configuration json you have made is definitely something good, so the graphical way could just create such configuration behind the scenes.
• like you did, it is important to associate the keybinding to each layout, then if a layout gets deleted we can update the configuration accordingly
• I see you had to identify each tile somehow. When a layout is edited, its tiles might change position (e.g you delete a tile). If that happens, the configuration is not valid anymore. I'm not sure about a good solution for this!
• Let's say the user has set keybindings for each tile of one layout. If you edit a layout and then add a tile, that one will be the only one without a keybinding associated. Meaning that the user must remember to go and associate that keybinding: this is not great

Please take all of that as nitpicks and they don't mean your work is bad. Indeed, you did an amazing job! Unfortunately, for me it is very important that Tiling Shell is stable and robust for every type of users. Because of that, any new feature must handle a lot of complexities.