Xwrits change log

2.26 3.Apr.2009
Correct handling of idle-time freedesktop.org ping messages, to avoid window managers thinking xwrits has died.

Some internal refactoring.

2.25 10.Jul.2006
Change behavior of ’+idle=TIME’ when a warning window pops up. Requested by Bernhard Reiter.

2.24 9.Jul.2006
Xwrits hand windows appear on all desktops, even after the first break. The freedesktop.org standard requires you tell the window manager about the all-desktops property *every time* the window reappears. Thanks to Zach Beane for a patch that inspired this search. Previously reported by Stephen A. Lawrence and Andy Feery.

Support MWM hints on 64-bit platforms. Bug report and initial patches from Jeff Layton.

Avoid infinite error recursion when windows are closed on +multiscreen. Bug reported in April 2004 by Chris Jones.

2.23 21.Jun.2006
Support ’+once[=COUNT]’ option. Patch by Anne Elizabeth Dudfield the Rad.

2.22 2.Apr.2005
Support ‘+finger=GIFFILE’. Requested by Urko Lusa. This change was made in August 2002, but for some reason never released.

2.21 6.May.2002
Add support for Xinerama. Requested by Orion Hodson <hodson@icir.org>.

2.20 17.Apr.2002
Add ‘title’ option. Suggested, and patch provided, by Dale Thatcher <xwrits@dalethatcher.com>.

Finally fix ‘--multiscreen’ option. Thanks to Orion Hodson <hodson@icir.org> for lending his multihead machine.

2.19 8.Feb.2002
The escalation "clock" corresponding to ‘after=TIME’ options proceeds even after you cancel a break by deleting all the xwrits windows. Therefore, you can no longer prevent escalation by deleting xwrits windows with your window manager.

Locking code works with large ‘lock-picture’s. Reported by Carlos O’Donell Jr. <carlos@baldric.uwo.ca>.

Add ‘bars-picture’ option. If you specify your own ‘lock-picture’, then ‘bars-picture’ defaults to a black screen. Say ‘bars-picture="&bars"’ to get the old behavior.

Add ‘+verbose’ option for debugging.

Xwrits checks whether other clients pay attention to KeyRelease events, as well as KeyPress events. This may improve its interaction with certain window managers. For example, xwrits seemed to come up less frequently than it should when I was using KDE.

‘--multiscreen’ still doesn’t seem to work, but I don’t know why.

2.18 21.Dec.2001
Fix ‘--multiscreen’ option. Reported by Jamie Zawinski <jwz@jwz.org>.

2.17 18.Dec.2001
Add ‘--multiscreen’ option. Requested by Jamie Zawinski <jwz@jwz.org>.

2.16 23.Aug.2001
Choose font more carefully, to avoid null pointer dereferences. Problem reported by Sharif Nassar <sharif@mrwacky.com>.

2.15 18.Apr.2001
Xwrits processes play nicely with one another. For example, two xwrits processes with ‘+top’ no longer fight each other to get to the top of the window stack; and xwrits processes inform one another when you click on a window to take a break. Requested by Thomer M. Gil <thomergil@hotmail.com>, who runs two xwrits processes at once: one for microbreaks, one for longer breaks.

2.14 15.Feb.2001
Fixed new crash when ‘+lock’ and ‘+breakclock’ were both supplied. Reported by Chris Keane <chris@chris-keane.co.uk>.

Fixed time-adjusting code when the system clock jumps backwards: Do not use the remaining-timeout value to calculate how much the system clock has changed. The symptom was that xwrits windows would stop animating if the system clock jumped backwards (even by a little bit).

2.13 11.Feb.2001
Documented multiple ‘breaktime’ specifications. This lets you, for example, make a break longer depending on how long you waited to take it. See the ESCALATION section of the manual page. These were added in an earlier version, but never documented.

The escalation "clock" corresponding to ‘after=TIME’ options proceeds even while xwrits thinks you’re resting. Therefore, you can no longer prevent escalation by clicking on the xwrits window (making it think you’re resting) and then typing some more. Requested by Conrad Hughes <conrad@eireann.org>.

Bug fix: The ‘breakclock’ always counts down from the end of the break. Previously, it counted back from a random time when ‘+mouse’ was true. Reported by Tijn Porcelijn <taine@3niat.myweb.nl>.

Hopefully fixed bugs that were causing xwrits to crash on Chris Keane <chris@chris-keane.co.uk>.

Bug fix: Erasing messages on the lock screen didn’t completely work if the hand picture was in the way. This resulted in unreadable displays. Fixed.

Hopefully fixed bugs that caused animation to stop sometimes.

The lock screen now shows how many characters of your unlock password you’ve typed.

2.12 14.Nov.2000
Changed Alarm structure into a doubly linked list. May improve performance when there are many xwrits windows.

2.11 29.Jan.2000
Fixed bug: destroying xwrits windows with the window manager could corrupt memory and eventually cause a crash. Reported by Anders Melchiorsen <and@kampsax.dtu.dk>.

2.10 5.Jan.2000
Xwrits can simultaneously monitor multiple displays (and report problems on all of them). Just give the ‘display’ option multiple times.

Added ‘lock-picture’ option.

Fixed bug: default ‘canceltime’ could be longer than ‘typetime’.

Fixed bug: sometimes the warning window picture would stop being animated.

2.9 30.Dec.1999
‘german’ is now its own beast: an animated gesture suggested by Andreas Stenger <Andreas.Stenger@smallworld.de>.

When ‘+quota’ is on and you take a quota break, xwrits lengthens your typing time by that amount, as well as shortening your break time by that amount. Now a break cycle -- the time from when one break is over, until when the next break is over -- is the same length of time (typetime plus breaktime) whether or not ‘+quota’ is in use. Suggested by Justin Wells <justin@fever.semiotek.com>.

Added ‘minbreaktime’ for use with ‘+quota’. It defaults to half the break length or the quota time, whichever is longer. Suggested by Justin Wells <justin@fever.semiotek.com>.

Added ‘canceltime’ option. This is the amount of time that you are allowed to type if you cancel a break (by deleting all xwrits windows with the window manager). Suggested, again, by Justin Wells <justin@fever.semiotek.com>.

Made GIF records read-only. This should result in slightly better memory performance in all cases, and especially for people running more than one xwrits at once.

2.9b1 10.Aug.1999
Added ‘+quota’ option. With ‘+quota=TIME’ on, if you leave your workstation idle for more than TIME, xwrits will subtract that idle time from the length of the next break. Requested by Justin Wells <justin@fever.semiotek.com>.

Xwrits always monitors your key presses, even with ‘-idle’. Sort of requested by Malcolm Ross Kinsella Ryan <malcolmr@cse.unsw.edu.au>.

Changed semantics of ‘+idle=IDLETIME’. Now the IDLETIME argument is the amount of time that must pass before an idle period is treated like a break. Something like this was requested by Peter Boult <pjb@sagres.com.au>.

Pressing the mouse button on an xwrits window counts as a key press.

Thickened index finger on ‘+finger=korean’ picture.

Added ‘german’, ‘japanese’, and ‘russian’ as synonyms for ‘+finger=korean’.

2.8 9.Aug.1999
Added the ‘+cheat’ option to allow limited cheating during a break.

Extended ‘+finger’ to ‘+finger=CULTURE’, and included a rude Korean gesture (‘+finger=korean’).

You can set the mouse motion detector’s sensitivity with ‘+mouse[=SENSITIVITY]’. Default sensitivity has been raised to 15 pixels. Requested by Radoslaw Stachowiak <radek.stachowiak@alter.pl>.

Changed the way times are parsed for consistency. Now a fractional number like ‘2.5’ means 2.5 minutes, not 2.5 seconds. You can still get 2.5 seconds with ‘:2.5’. A clarification of the time situation was originally requested by Sam Ockman <ockman@cs.stanford.edu>.

Fixed bugs in ‘+multiply’: iconifying a multiplied warning window would cause a crash, and new warning windows wouldn’t have clocks attached.

Fixed bugs in picture loading code: multiple ‘flashtime’ options had no effect since 2.8b1.

2.8b2 4.Aug.1999
Xwrits can finally monitor your mouse movements with the ‘+mouse’ option. I’ve been meaning to implement this feature for years. It has been requested by Radoslaw Stachowiak <radek.stachowiak@alter.pl>, Justin Wells <justin@fever.semiotek.com>, Chris Brand <chris_brand@raytheon.com>, Mark Lewis <mlewis@cgrg.ohio-state.edu>, Alex Westner <westner@media.mit.edu>, Peter Boult <pjb@sagres.com.au>, Malcolm Ross Kinsella Ryan <malcolmr@cse.unsw.edu.au>, Sam Ockman <ockman@cs.stanford.edu>, and possibly others.

You can specify your own GIF pictures or animations for the warning, resting, and ready windows with the ‘--warning-picture’, ‘--rest-picture’, and ‘--ready-picture’ options. I’ve been meaning to implement this feature for a while, too. Tom Murphy <murphy@quixote.engr.sgi.com> also requested it.

Various code cleanups and some bug fixes.

2.8b1 3.Aug.1999
Fixed bugs related to the count of how many hands were actively visible. This surfaced in several ways: too few multiplied windows, deleting xwrits windows could cause a segmentation fault, and so forth. Bug reported by Darko Marinov <marinov@lcs.mit.edu>.

Different ‘+top’ behavior: now warning windows look at the window stacking order and try to keep themselves on top.

Simplified clock drawing mechanism.

Updated GIF library to 0.9999.

2.7.3 28.Dec.1998
Updated GIF library to 0.99; moved to config.h-based configuration.

Use the failing-malloc library to avoid problems with some systems’ bad realloc() definitions.

2.7.2 16.Dec.1998
Another bug fix in code for adjusting break length (sometimes it wouldn’t notice that a break should be over, and would incorrectly start flashing when you typed).

Finally, real ‘--help’!

2.7.1 9.Dec.1998
Fixed bug where breaks would often be dramatically shortened for no good reason. (The problem: there were several static variables named last_key_time, instead of one global variable.)

2.7 7.Dec.1998
Xwrits will adjust the length it wants you to rest depending on how long it’s been since you last typed. Bug reported by A.T. Hofkamp <a.hofkamp@wtb.tue.nl>.

Xwrits now behaves robustly when the system time is adjusted backwards.

The xwrits package now uses automake.

2.6.5 6.Oct.1998
Makefiles: Fixed vpath builds and problems with old ‘make’s (makes which didn’t support $< in explicit rules).

2.6.4 26.Sep.1998
Added ‘--help’ (well, ‘help’) to conform to GNU program behavior standards.

Makefiles: Added ‘make uninstall’ target, enabled ‘./configure’s program name transformations, made VPATH builds possible.

2.6.3 7.Sep.1998
No user-visible changes (fixed configuration bugs and renamed some variables).

2.6.2 17.Aug.1998
Bug fix: If ‘idle’ was off, the warning window would never appear (it was waiting for a key press -- stupid, since it wasn’t listening for any key presses). Bug reported by Malcolm Ross Kinsella Ryan <malcolmr@cse.unsw.edu.au>.

2.6.1 8.Jun.1998
Fixed the clock, which will now disappear properly instead of leaving a black square (even in mono).

2.6 29.May.1998
Made and included pictures for monochromatic screens and added ‘mono’ option.

Bug fixes for ‘lock’, ‘clock’ and ‘breakclock’.

Restored the time argument to ‘idle’.

2.6b8 27.May.1998
Added support for --long-options and --version.

Fixed race condition in schedule.c, which could result in losing keystrokes. Bug reported by Gregory Galperin <grg@ai.mit.edu>.

2.6b7 23.May.1998
Clock improvements: fixed problem with black-on-black clock on 24-plane displays (it had to do with visual selection: WhitePixel wasn’t white since the Visual was not the default). Also improved clock appearance and made it appear more like when it’s supposed to. Bug reported by Erez Zadok <ezk@cs.columbia.edu>.

2.6b6 5.May.1998
Improved the configure script to use <sys/types.h> for u_int32_t, etc. when possible.

Fixed bug in gifx.c: on a 24-plane display, any picture came out all black. (The problem: implementation-specific behavior of <<; specifically, I expected 1<<32 == 0 for 32-bit ints.) Bug reported by Alexander Konstantinou <akonstan@cs.columbia.edu> and Matthew Lewis <mlewis@cgrg.ohio-state.edu>.

Added visual searching: xwrits will now use a TrueColor visual if available.

2.6b4 5.May.1998
Updated GIF library to 0.9, the version used in Gifsicle. This has temporarily broken support for monochrome displays, but will hopefully fix other bugs some people have experienced.

2.6b3 24.Nov.1997
Fixed installation and improved the configure script.

2.6b2
Fixed bug with freeing memory multiple times. Works better on Linux now. Thanks to Albert L. Ting <alt@artisan.com> for a patch.

2.5 13.Nov.1995
The most important change is the +idle option, on by default, which makes xwrits slightly smarter than an alarm clock. The code has also been completely reorganized around the Alarm concept, which makes it much cleaner.

Version 2
Many, many more options have been added. The code has been cleaned up a great deal, and also expanded a great deal. Comments should still be added to the code.

Xwrits no longer uses XPM files. Instead, it uses GIF files, with some proprietary extensions. The GIF files are compiled into C files, then object files, and read from memory. This makes xwrits a much, much smaller executable, faster, and more portable.

Version 1 Summer 1994
Original distribution.

Xwrits home, OK?