Sawfish and emacspeak

["T. V. Raman" <raman@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

There have been a few questions about sawfish and
emacspeak-- here is a brief explanation.

What is Sawfish?

Sawfish is a window manager for the GNOME desktop.

A window manager's job in brief is to manage windows, help
you launch other apps, --it is the genie that reacts when
you click on a window border etc; under GNOME it also
hand-shakes with gnome to do session management etc.

I'll cite below the sawfish related lines from NEWS-13.0 
which is when this module was first released for emacspeak,
and elaborate a little on what that meant.

** Sawfish:

Added subdirectory `sawfish' containing a tts.jl module for
interfacing sawfish to the Emacspeak speech servers.
Directory sawfish also contains my personal sawfishrc file
as an example of how to load and use this package.
When set up, this speech-enables the sawfish window manager.

Explanation:

What the above does is to add a little speech-enabler to
sawfish by:
0) configures sawfish to use auditory icons 

1) Having sawfish speak the title bar of the window when a
window gets focus 

2) Set up convenience commands to start emacs or switch to a
running emacs session

3) Set up convenience keybindings in the sample sawfishrc 
to switch amongst windows etc.

I wrote the above as an aid to potentially hacking GTK/gnome
apps over time, it's only useful if you have a good reason
to run emacspeak under X; it *does not*:

A) Enhance emacspeak in anyway
B) Make X/GTK/Gnome  apps talk 

** emacspeak-Sawfish:
Speech-enables interaction with the sawfish window manager.

Sawfish itself can be controlled by a client program-- using
that client program you can evaluate lisp code to find out
what windows are on the screen, who has focus etc.  Again
this is mostly useful if you're trying to hack GTK/Gnome.

There is a sawfish interaction mode for emacs,
which lets you run this client inside emacs;
module emacspeak-sawfish speech-enables that module.

-- 
Best Regards,
--raman

      
Email:  raman@xxxxxxxxxxx
WWW: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/raman/             
PGP:    http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/raman/raman.asc 

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