Re: Miniaturize a panel

[Wolfgang Lux]

Germán Arias wrote:

> With native decoration, trying to miniaturize a panel don't work (I'm
> trying on GNOME). Sometimes works, but this is a odd behavior.

Quoting Apple's User Interface Guidelines: “A user would never need to  
minimize a panel because it is displayed only when needed and  
disappears when its application is inactive. Therefore, the minimize  
button is always unavailable. A panel should have the close and zoom  
buttons or, if you don’t want users to be able to use the zoom button,  
only the close button.” (http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/ 
UserExperience/Conceptual/AppleHIGuidelines/XHIGWindows/ 
XHIGWindows.html%23//apple_ref/doc/uid/20000961-TPXREF17).

So the problem is that GNOME's window manager displays a miniaturize  
button in the first place (incidentally, I observed this behavior  
under KDE and not under GNOME, but then I'm not using either of these  
environments regularly). The problem is that -back uses Motif style  
window manager hints to tell the window manager about the intended  
window decorations and in addition maps window levels onto EWMH window  
types. Unfortunately, the EWMH standard gives window managers a lot  
(too much?) of freedom about how to decorate windows and in particular  
allows them to completely ignore Motif style window manager hints and  
we end up with panels that are not prepared (or supposed) to be  
miniaturized but do have a miniaturize button.

Maybe its time to reconsider the use of EWMH window types -back.  
Actually, I have commented out this code altogether in my local  
GNUstep tree because the mapping does not work at all with Apple's  
quartz-wm.

Wolfgang