Re: Visual bell

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com> writes: 
> My guess is that since the window-border flashing is an obvious
> possibility, and any app can flash the screen (by posting a big window
> and then unposting it), the most likely candidate is Metacity.
> 
> What do you think, Havoc?  I can probably provide a patch for this, with
> conditional compilation so that Metacity doesn't have to depend on XKB. 
> However I think you would be the right person to decide how a
> "window-decoration-centric" visual bell feature should look and be
> implemented in Metacity.
> 

Sure, it sounds fine to me. We just need to get it spec'd out how the
WM knows to display a bell. i.e. does metacity listen for some Xkb
signal, or do we need to add a client message and support it in
gdk_beep(), or what.

If you want to flash window borders, ideally we could think of a way
to do this in a theme-agnostic fashion (such as lightening the whole
border, or something); otherwise we'll need to break the theme format
to require themes to explicitly define a "flash on" state.  The
problem here is knowing which window to flash, though. (Unless you
want to flash them all, but that seems bizarre.)

Havoc