Re: Theme patriation

[Steve Frécinaux <nudrema gmail com>]

Jacob Kroon wrote:
> IMO decorating a window belongs in the WM, not all X applications use
> GTK as rendering toolkit...

And all GTK users do not use metacity. But if we always stick to that 
kind of arguments, we can never go forward. I'd just say "let's keep 
practical and backward compatible".

Having the window decorations as a common canvas has some advantages. 
Having seen the vista thing lately, I saw they do fun things like adding 
a menu directly to the title bar, nice tab integration (chrome). They 
also have evil things like being totally inconsistent from one app to 
another.

Thinking from a linux-centric viewpoint, it would make it possible for 
us to implement that sort of things: 
http://tango.freedesktop.org/Window_Experiments

As Iain noticed it has a few drawbacks for windows responsiveness (or 
lack thereof) and memory footprint.

Now, maybe the route is halfway. I do not know if it is possible, but we 
could have a zone that is shared by both of the processes, so we get the 
best of both worlds.

Anyway, I think the interaction between the WM and the app is sort of 
limited nowadays...


As a side element, Gnome has always desired a document-centric approach, 
while some people wanted to go more the app-way with multiple tabs, etc. 
Considering this, what about going halfway too and having something that 
resembles the chrome interface? It looks like another use case for such 
an integration between the app and the WM, since it is quite borderline 
to know which responsability it is to handle tabs in that case 
(considering alt-tab, etc).

Just a thought,
Steve