Re: Window manager interaction

[Wolfgang Lux]

Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:

> On 16 Oct 2009, at 19:16, Wolfgang Lux wrote:
>
> > IMHO Richard's proposal is much too complicated. I'd suggest  
> > something
> > radically simpler: If an application does not have an appicon the  
> > hide
> > command should just minimize all application windows. As far as I
> > understand this also was the solution used by Apple in OpenStep  
> > 4.2 for
> > Windows. See, e.g., http://support.apple.com/kb/TA45871 and search  
> > for
> > the term "hide" (with quotation marks) in that document. This can be
> > implemented trivially with the three-line patch below in  
> > NSApplication.m.
>
> Good idea, but unfortunately that approach does not really work and  
> is not really that simple:
>
> 1. the app is not properly hidden ... there are potentially loads  
> of miniwindows left visible
> 2. the app is potentially 'lost' (as at present) if it has no  
> windows (and hence no miniwindows)
> 3. there is no consideration of unhiding ... allowing for that  
> would require a lot more code (to track which windows were  
> miniaturised as part of the hide process, and automatically  
> deminiaturise them when you click on any of the miniwindows of the  
> 'hidden' app).
>
> Problem (2) is the problem we currently have ... so this approach  
> actually adds an issue (1) without solving the original issue.

You are right with issue (1), but this is only for the case where an  
application
deliberately hides its appicon. On the other hand, in Phillipe's case  
I feel that
GSSupressAppIcon is abused (somewhat) as a workaround for the lack of  
better
integration with the foreign environment. Maybe it would be a better  
idea to make
use of the current interface style instead of checking the  
_app_icon_window
attribute. Then, assuming that, e.g., an interface style  
NSWindows95InterfaceStyle
indicates the presence of a taskbar, the application should suppress  
its appicon
*and* not manage any miniwindows on itself. Thus, problem (1) would  
go away.

With respect to problem (2), I think that this could be handled by  
terminating
applications by default when their last window is closed and the  
application
delegate does not respond to - 
applicationShouldTerminateAfterLastWindowClosed:.

I see issue (3) as rather unproblematic. If the app is properly  
hidden, the user
cannot invoke -unhide: in the first place except by selecting the  
Show All menu
command from another GNUstep application. We could simply ignore this  
request
since the native applications of the foreign gui environment do not  
understand
that request and we would at least be consistent with our environment.

But even if you are not happy with that suggestion, I'd really prefer  
to add the
additional flag to every window that would allow distinguishing  
whether a window
was miniaturized or "hidden" than to delve into the hairy interaction  
with lots
of different window managers out there and trying to convince them to  
manage the
offscreen appicon. In my opinion back is already bloated too much  
with conditional
code that is supposed to work with WindowMaker, KDE, Gnome, and whats  
not. Yet,
it nevertheless does not really work with, e.g., Apple's quartz-wm  
(Apple managed
to implement the NETWM specification in completely weird ways, but  
that is a
different story).

Wolfgang