Re: Window manager interaction

[Aria Stewart]

On Oct 18, 2009, at 3:21 AM, Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:

> On 18 Oct 2009, at 05:31, Sheldon Gill wrote:
>
> > Actually, I think it would simplify things a great deal if we  
> > dropped the miniwindow entirely.
> >
> > I believe the fundamental problem here is one of design and the  
> > flaw is trying to get -gui to handle miniwindows. For any  
> > compatibility desktop we want to consider (GNOME, KDE, MS-WIN...)  
> > the answer is conceptually straight-forward:
> >  a window sets its state to whatever, including MAXIMIZED,  
> > ICONIFIED/MINIMISED
> >  the desktop environment does the display

It seems like a really good idea. There's some wear beginning to show  
in Gnome, where people are starting to want to draw on icons, and  
there's a move to client-side windows for a lot of things. I think  
this is a good thing.

Window managers need a way to deal with miniwindows, and I think it's  
time to solve this in a cross-platform way. The time's really ripe to  
get a spec that works for Gnome and Gnustep both.

> I happen to like minwindows (they were great in NeXTstep), though I  
> agree that the world has standardised on a less functional mechanism  
> and the advantage of the miniwindow (allowing user interaction with  
> a minimised window) is, as a consequence, practically never used.   
> On the other hand, maintaining OpenStep backward compatibility is  
> not the issue here.

I like the concept of miniwindows, but I'd love to see some evolution  
that lets us have a MacOS-style dock that really works.

I'd also really love to be able to use Metacity as a window manager.

There's also a move toward application-handled decoration, and specs  
are being built for this. I think it's ripe time for Gnustep to get  
involved there, too.
> The actual problem is that X doesn't differentiate between a window  
> being mapped and a window being de-iconified,  so you can't know  
> when a window is de-iconified in order to send the notification  
> mandated by the OSX NSWindow API.  In fact, this problem does not  
> occur with miniwindows (since when X tells us a miniwindow has been  
> mapped, we know that the normal window has been miniaturised, and  
> when X tells us it is unmapped, we know the normal window has been  
> deminiaturized).  The problem ONLY occurs when we are using the  
> standard X mechanism/architecture you describe.

Indeed, though modern window managers do give some better messages.