Drawers in Metacity

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

Way back in June, I played around with implementing drawers in Metacity,
like in MacOS X.  If you have no idea what I'm talking about, see:

http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2002/02/15/cocoa.html

A couple of people expressed interest in this on #gnome-hackers, so I
decided to toss my stuff up on the web and send this email.

http://www.gnome.org/~shaunm/drawers-030608-0.tar.gz

Drawers are a really nice way of doing sidebars.  Opening, closing, and
resizing them doesn't cause a relayout or reposition of the main window
content.

My implementation is somewhat different than OS/X.  On OS/X, drawers
fill the entire height of their parent window.  In my implementation,
you can resize drawers vertically, and their maximum size is constrained
by the parent window.  My implementation puts an actual titlebar on the
drawer.  Since they don't fill the parent window height, you can move
them up and down along the side of the parent window.

On OS/X, drawers have this quasi-window-border-esque thing.  (Windows
don't generally have borders on OS/X.)  The vertical side of that window
border can be used for horizontal resizing.  My implementation just uses
standard window borders, of course.

My implementation was just a prototype I played around with a few months
ago.  It has plenty of problems, but nothing unsurmountable.  I'm just
throwing this out for discussion.  I'm not really formally proposing it.

--
Shaun