Re: panel behind window

[Toralf Lund <toralf procaptura com>]

Ryan McDougall wrote:

> On Thu, 2005-10-03 at 14:16 +0100, harald wanadoo nl wrote:
>  
>
> > Hi users of this gnome-group,
> >
> > I am Harald and new to this mailinglist. Perhaps I don't know enouht about the 
> > precies meaning about this list, so please excuse me if will apear my 
> > question doesn't belong to this list.
> >    
>
> Well, welcome Harald, we're happy to have you here. However mailing
> lists ending -devel usually are about the actual development (writing of
> code), so user questions are best off in gnome-list.
>
>  
>
> > So here is my question:
> > Am I right that in Gnome it is not possible to get the panels behind the 
> > application window, and it probably will not in the near future eigther? I 
> > heard about it, but am not sure the information, especially the last, is 
> > right.
> > That would be a pitty I think and for me a reason to go back to my slow KDE.
> > Do anyone here know more about this?
> >    
Yep. You are right. It's not "possible", but read on. I tried to argue 
against that a long time ago, but couldn't get the right people to agree 
with me... I think the current behaviour is simply wrong, since the 
desktop/panel should be there to help me, not get in my way. Also, 
everything is supposed to be simple and just work and all that, why not 
treat the panel as just another window? (I mean, not in the sense of 
adding decorations etc, but in the sense of not hardcoding special 
behaviour for raise, lower and constraints imposed on other windows.)

> I don't personally know if your right, but you can try looking yourself
> in either the gnome mailing list archives
> http://mail.gnome.org/archives/ , or by searching bugzilla
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/query.cgi .
>
> I do know however that even if we don't offer feature X, we do want to
> make sure you can still get your work done with GNOME, which sometimes
> means you can do Y which does the same thing but easier. ;)
>
> For example, if your worried about screen real-estate, I set my panels
> to autohide with only one pixel showing.
Personally, I find autohide very annoying. I just can't get used to 
stuff that jumps out at me like that.

However, there is a different Y, or somewhere else to go back (than to 
slow KDE.) The thing is, this is all a window manager issue. I'm still 
using the Sawfish window manager myself (it used to be the GNOME 
default) for the sole reason of getting the panel behaviour the way I 
want. For more info, see 
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=32 (it doesn't 
seem like there has been a lot of development on it lately, but it runs 
just fine on my Fedora Core 3 setup. And there are other alternative 
WMs, too.)

To switch window mangers, you'd simply do something like

killall -TERM metacity && sawfish

in the shell, then save session.

> If you have an app that doesn't
> use the 'fullscreen' WM hint properly, then its a bug with the app, not
> GNOME.
>  

> Anyways, reply on gnome-list gnome org with more details if you want to
> discuss it.
>
>  
>
> > With kind regards,
> > Harald
> >    
>
> Cheers,
> Ryan
>
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