Re: MC and the desktop

[raster redhat com]

On 19 May, Stephanos Piperoglou shouted:
->  On Tue, 19 May 1998, Miguel de Icaza wrote:
->  
->  > This is caused because the icons on the desktop are shaped windows.  I
->  > should put a configuration option to toggle this behaviour on and
->  > off. 
->  
->  I'm wondering if there's another way to do this. Perhaps draw the icons on
->  the root window direct? A lot of people like having lots of icons on their
->  desktop, and if this is such a CPU hog then it will bring even a powerful
->  system to its knees calculating say 50+ shaped windows. The current sytem
->  has an advantage, though: if you have a quick way to lower your windows (I
->  do: mouse 1 on the title bar Raises/Lowers) you can get to the desktop icons
->  without iconifying, something you can't do in Win or Mac AFAIK.

to be honest this is an issue better addressed at the Xserver level.
The shape extension has been notoriously underused until recently and
thus its design and code has not changed for years. It was originalyl
designed to do simplistic shapes not comples images with high-detail
levels and random parts of shapes all over. (the shape extension uses
slipping rectangles internally - thus try a full-screen checkerboard
patterend shaped window - worst case scenario - serever goes to all
hell). The server shoudl infact be more intelligent and deside at a
certain threshold (ie break up a window into tiles or strips of lest
say 16 or 32 pixels in height and perform this evaluation on each
unit), to use a real mask instead of a series of clipping rects. thsi
would give considerable speedups for complex shapes, and woudl be the
"right thing to do" (tm) (ie the server could then additionaly use
possible hardware acceleration if it exists to do clipping maskign etc.)



->  Rectangles suit me for now, though. Thanx.
->  
->  -- Stephanos Piperoglou -- sp249@cam.ac.uk -------------------
->  All tribal myths are true, for a given value of `true'.
->                           - Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent
->  ------------------------- http://www.thor.cam.ac.uk/~sp249/ --
->  
->  

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