Re: Tabbed windows in Mutter/Metacity

[Sam H <emoogila gmail com>]

On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 11:26 AM, Jason D. Clinton<me jasonclinton com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 8:18 AM, Sam H <emoogila gmail com> wrote:
>>
>> I would like to implement support for tabbed windows in Mutter, and
>> was hoping for some helpful pointers. I envision tabbed windows
>> working essentially the same way that tabs work in Google Chrome.
>> However, being part of the window-manager, every application would
>> make use of tabs without having to re-invent them specifically for
>> that application. It has always struck me that tabs were something
>> that belonged into the window manager, not in browsers, terminals,
>> editors, etc.
>
> Hi Sam,
>
> I just wanted to offer encouragement and make it clear what you're getting
> in to. Hacking is always welcome, of course. However, if you don't already
> know, you should know that X11 window managers are nasty, nasty things with
> some twenty years of heiratage that they carry forward in their code-bases.
> As an example, as recently as two years ago, you could not use Mathematica
> for Linux on a certain subset of new-ish window managers because obscure
> quirks were not implemented.
>
> I think the most compatible way to go about implementing this would be stack
> 100% independent windows on top of each other with each of the windows in
> the stack exposing its own tab at the right offset to give the impression
> that they are the same tab stack. You'll need to modify the drop shadow
> rendering for the n+1 windows. On the plus side, this would make docking and
> un-docking tabs trivial.
>
> Anyway, happy hacking and best of luck to you.
>
>

Thanks everyone for the encouragement and tips. I will set-up a public
git repository for this project soon, probably on github. I still need
some more time to familiarize myself with the Mutter source code
before starting any actual coding. Help from other contributors will
of course be more than welcome.

Cheers,
Sam