Re: Visual bell

[Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>]

HI:


On Wed, 2002-10-23 at 09:05, Michele Campeotto wrote:
> Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > window border makes sense to me, if the idea is to associate the bell
> > with an app. (Unless everyone is using mouse focus)

Yes, though as I have pointed out, we don't reliably know which app sent
the bell.  In the future we could patch gtk+ to use the Xkb bell API
instead of XBell, when XKB is available, and this would mean that for
GTK+ apps, at least, we would usually know which window to associate
with the beep.

>    probably something like the black border used when switching focus 
> with Alt-Tab could be a nice idea, since it removes the need for 
> updating the themes and works for unfocused windows too.

I think there are problems with the black border; there are complaints
about its thickness, but making it thinner would reduce visibility for
this sort of application.  Also, for some themes the black line might
not be very visible at all (for instance, a white-on-black inverse
theme).

So I believe something using themeable colors is the better solution. 
Flashing the window border ('default' themes could just flash between
active/inactive state) would have the advantage of not forcing expose
events on the apps (which is a performance concern that has been
raised).  If this were the "default" window border visual-bell
indication, it would require no additions to the Metacity themes.  Since
it might still be desirable and useful to allow some other visual change
to the window border for "beep", I think it would be handy to allow a
Metacity theme to add visual specs for such a state, so that if the
theme provided a bell-specific visual, Metacity would use that visual
for the bell "flash", otherwise revert to the active/inactive toggle
above.  That would be both flexible and backwards-compatible.

regards,

-Bill
 
> -- 
>    Michele - micampe micampe it
> 
> Fortunately I've been adehering to a pretty strict
> drug regimen to keep my mind... limber.
>    -- The Dude, "The Big Lebowski"
>