E/Gnome window placement quirks

[Daniel Burrows <Daniel_Burrows brown edu>]

  I've attached a small screenshot to this to illustrate what I'm talking about.
I'll refer to it from time to time, so please take a look.

  I don't know whether this should be sent as a comment on E or on Gnome, but
several people have brought up what I'm talking about on this list so I'm
posting this here.  These are some annoying facets of the way the E handles
window placement, window stacking, and window movement.  Note that there may
be a way to fix these but Gnome/E is supposed to be usable and _pleasant_
without requiring lots of tweaking (although I enjoy tweaking whenever
possible:-) )  These all relate to the (excellent) E-Mac theme recently posted
to e.themes.org. (if the author is listening..let me move and resize windows
using wmaker-style click-and-drag and I don't think I'll have anything left
to complain about :-) )

  The basic problem is that E doesn't seem to recognize the concept of a screen
area beyond which windows can't be dragged or placed unless it's absolutely
necessary. (eg, a program requests a window which is too big for the
screen).  Because of this, windows tend to get haphazardly strewn over the
desktop dragbar, under panels, under theme decorations, and on top of other
important stuff.  Moreover, the panel places itself in the corner regardless of
what E decorations are lying around, and gmc puts icons in the same place all
the time.  In addition, windows sometimes end up on top of these but sometimes
don't (I can make icons overlap windows)  I have an idea about a way to solve
this, but even if my way isn't the best--something has to be done.  This
mess needs to be cleared up before 1.0.

  I don't know enough about the current WM communication scheme to know exactly
what needs to be changed, but I think that the best way of doing things would
be to:

 * give the WM some concept of windows with "special" placement treatement, and
 * Give each window a 'placement niceness' which determines what priority
  they get (default 0).  Windows would never be placed over a window with a
  lower niceness if possible.

  For example, I'd set the niceness of the E menu bar and dragbar to -20, the
niceness of the panel to -10, and the niceness of the gmc icons to -5.  So
the windows would be placed as follows:

(1) the menubar and taskbar would go at the top and bottom of the screen,
  respectively.  The 'area available for special placement' would eliminate
  these two regions.

(2) the panel would request placement at the top and bottom of the screen.  But
  since the area available has been diminished, it would actually get stuck
  directly underneath the menubar and directly above the dragbar.

(3) gmc would have its icons placed in the upper-left region of the remaining
  available space.

  (I suppose that for purposes of the calculation, an edge panel and a corner
   panel would have to be treated the same way)

  To deal with windows getting in the way of special decorations or the panel, I
suppose you'd need some sort of WM hint that says "don't allow windows to
move over this window".  Or maybe just configure it in the WM for each window
class?  (icky, but can I do this already?)  Probably a corner panel should
allow windows to move over/under it, but an edge panel shouldn't..

  Daniel

-- 
  Fate always wins...at least, when people stick to the rules.

             -- Terry Pratchett, _Interesting Times_