Re: MC and the desktop

[<nuke bayside net>]

On Tue, 19 May 1998 raster@redhat.com wrote:

> 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.)
> 

as a matter of fact, due to XFree's latest decision to "screw the open
group" and do their own thing, this would be a good first split from the
R6.3 standard code. [Nuke hands raster a text editor and 50mb of XFree
source:)]

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