After my musings about big clunky "all in one" window manager apps, I got to thinking - the best way to make things properly sectioned off is to follow the truest unix philosophy - use text streams as an interface. It's what makes the simplest tools like cat/sed/awk/ls so powerful. Why don't we extend this into GUI land.
First a note: this is not a purely original idea - this is a refined one. Plan9 has had comparable things for some time - Plan9's "plumber" was a utility that snagged text from an application, checked it for whatever attributes it wanted, and acted on it - i.e. if the text matched a URL, it'd open a browser, if it was a paragraph it would open an editor with that text, if it was a foreign language it could run some sort of translation app on it and spit it into an editor. The plumber was, of course, entirely configurable with regexs and filters and all that jazz. On another note, wmii-3 (and current snapshots) have a similar interface to what I'm proposing (because it, too, was inspired by Plan9) - but it is very much integrated with the window manager.
Anyway, on to my ideas. As you could have gleened via the title, I think a fuse FS would add a huge amount of potential to any WM out there. Image, if you will, being able to change a window's title with "echo NEWTITLE > windows/1234/title", or to resize a window with "echo 200 > windows/1234/width". With functionality like this, it's cake to bind these to keys (maybe even with xbindkeys). This allows for a huge amount of typical window manager functionality to be moved out of the core.
I am proposing a layout like so: $XFUSE_ROOT/ core/ root/ (typical window stuff here) socket (symlink) num_windows ... windows/ 1234/ title x y width height children/ (window symlinks) state ... ...
Something like this should be fairly easy to develop, and should not suffer from the typical "scope creep" I'm so fond of - I mean, it doesn't have "features", it just spits things out.
Thoughts?