Refactoring our (X11) code to allow wibox and naughty to run in their own process without the WM part

[actionless]

sorry for offtopic, i was thinking what if we need to find some communication way for separating widgets to a separate file could it make sense to also separate them to a different main loop? or overhead of inter-process communication will be higher than was what saved on this?

Maybe we should open a new topic for that. Way-cooler "can do it" in the sense it can run multiple independent Awesome instances. Refactoring our (X11) code to allow wibox and naughty to run in their own process without the WM part would also allow them to be used in i3 and corrupt their userbase to switch to full Awesomeness. IPC isn't really an issue if we can get GDBus to not crash. If done correctly it can work. Not as default since it makes a bunch of things more complicated, but it could optionally be done. It would need a nice corountine based high level dbus API wrapper, but that's doable. The second step would be to also allow some kind of wibox.container.layer to allow widgets themselves to be composited from external process and have nice animations and GL shading magic. Way-cooler is more capable in that regard since awesome-x11 has no compositing capabilities and I don't think anyone wants to go that way (including me).

i oppose what it will make impossible for user to redefine panel layout, ie add widget, without modifying the theme

But that's kind of the whole point. theme.lua becomes the new rc.lua. It becomes the file the new users care about the most (assuming they like unixporn more than usability).

Originally posted by @Elv13 in #1508 (comment)

[Elv13]

And @psychon sent me this earlier today:

running awesome without it being the window manager would be rather
easy. It just requires dropping the right bits and hoping that the rest
still works properly. Mainly, this would be
XCB_EVENT_MASK_SUBSTRUCTURE_REDIRECT and then dropping everything that
tries to reparent windows, mess with the stacking order and client
focus. Some more work would be necessary to make things work properly,
but all in all, this could be doable.