Re: Drawers in Metacity

[Rob Adams <readams readams net>]

It may make sense to have some sort of WM support for something like
this, but if we add it to metacity it would need to be a part of the
EWMH.  Alternatively this could be implemented by GTK by setting
TYPE_MENU on the drawers (maybe, not exactly sure of the semantics for
drawers). I don't have time to build it and try it out right now, so
some screenshots would indeed be very nice, and also a patch -up against
HEAD would be good.  If this could be implemented in GTK only it would
be better, since if the feature requires WM support many GTK apps
wouldn't be able to use it, since most would want to be able to be
ported to windows or to run under KWin or twm or whatever.

Couple of questions: what happens if you try to open a drawer when the
window is already against the left edge of the screen? I.e. does it push
over the window or just clip the drawer to the screen like a menu
would?  Also, should this be brought up on usability ?

-Rob

On Thu, 2003-10-30 at 11:05, Alan wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> We [me] demand.....
>                 some SCREENSHOTS!
> 
> /monty python
> 
> > 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.
> 
> I always thought that it was more a GTK implementation than something in 
> Metacity, but not being a gnome hacker I'll just smile and nod and say "good 
> on you" :)
> 
> Personally I think that this is a great idea.  I loved drawers the first
> time I saw them in a news aggregator under os/x (netnewswire?), and then
> being used to hold the mailbox tree in the Mail application.  I thought 
> that they were a very cool and useful UI element that would be a nice 
> addition to the GTK/GNOME toolkit, assuming they aren't patented by apple 
> of course.
> 
> Alan