Re: WM <--> panel protocol

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Mon, Feb 10, 2003 at 06:04:20PM +1300, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> 	For a while now we've been talking about moving the panel's global
> keybindings out of the panel and into the window manager in an effort to
> rid us of one more point of keybindings clashes.
> 
> 	I've hacked up a simple ClientMessage based protocol and implemented it
> for metacity. Attached is the gnome-panel and metacity patches and a
> short spec.
> 
> 	Thoughts, comments etc. welcome.

Oh, I just asked you about this. ;-) Clearly I should read all my mail
before replying to any of it. Ah well.

Thoughts:

> _GNOME_DOCK_ACTION Protocol
> 
>   The _GNOME_DOCK_ACTION WM_PROTOCOL is a simple mechanism
>   whereby the window manager may invoke one of a number of
>   actions on a DOCK type toplevel window (as advertised by
>   the _NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE hint).

Doesn't seem all that dock-specific really. Perhaps it should just 
be _GNOME_DESKTOP_ACTION and go to the root window.

As long as it's _GNOME private though it probably doesn't matter a
whole lot, assuming the panel exists and handles this stuff itself is
fine.
 
>     _GNOME_DOCK_ACTION_MAIN_MENU, ATOM
>     _GNOME_DOCK_ACTION_RUN_DIALOG, ATOM
>     _GNOME_DOCK_ACTION_SCREENSHOT, ATOM
>     _GNOME_DOCK_ACTION_WINDOW_SCREENSHOT, ATOM

For screenshot, I'd just use the metacity run_command bindings
perhaps. The only downside to that is making configuring that binding
a slightly more technical/advanced thing to do. But given that
PrintScreen is hardcoded in every windows app ever and PrintScreen has
no other useful purpose (other than perhaps some kernel debugging
thing), I would feel pretty safe here.

Havoc