Re: [Pan-users] New Windows installer

[Duncan]

Alan Taylor posted on Sun, 20 Mar 2016 15:05:03 -0300 as excerpted:

> I would expect Windows can somehow control the size of a particular
> window, but I have no idea how it is done outside of the program that
> created the window.  It's strange that the problem dimension won't
> respond to manual adjustment.  This is Windows 10, which may have some
> left-over window pane tweak from Windows 8 (TIFKAM) which did funny
> things with windows panes for hard-core users.  Users like me were fine
> with Win 8, 8.1 and I am (mostly) fine with Win 10.

FWIW, I believe that kde/kwin's window rule thing is a rarity on X/Linux 
as well, tho of course on X/Linux you choose your own X window manager, 
there's no real X default (tho various distros pick their own default 
desktop environment and with it a default window manager), as there is on 
MS.

But for window managers that don't offer that level of built-in control, 
there's various commandline utilities, like wmctrl, that offer it.

That's similar to the way MS window management worked a decade and a half 
ago, on '98.  Only the third party window management utilities on MS, at 
least back then and I'd imagine it's similar today, tended to be more GUI 
oriented, much like KDE/KWin's window rules, while the third party 
utilities on Linux tend to be more commandline oriented, thus directly 
supporting scriptability and the ability to invoke specific commands, 
possibly via hotkey, that do specific things.

Regardless, I've come to depend on and assume the ability to override 
window behavior, to the point that if I ever left KDE/Plasma/KWin and 
it's window rules behind, if the window manager I chose in its place 
didn't have a similar feature of its own, I'd be spending quite some time 
over a week or so hacking up scripts to be run by wmctrl or the like, and 
likely either a start-with X and whatever desktop environment background 
script, to watch for and match specific windows and run the appropriate 
wmctrl command to force the behavior I want, or wrapper scripts for the 
various normal executables, with the wrapper enforcing the behavior I 
want.

Because I've become so used to simply being able to override an 
application's normal behavior that I'd have a hard time living without 
that ability, now.  I really and truly like being in command of how stuff 
behaves on my desktop, and if it doesn't work the way I think it should, 
I arrange to force it to work the way I want it to.

Which as much as anything explains why I'm so much more at home on Linux 
than on MS or OSX (and Gnome on Linux) as well.  They assume a much less 
demanding user that's simply content to live with what the programmer 
decreed.  I'm anything but! =:^)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman