Re: Notes on the Metacity compositor

[Rob Adams <readams readams net>]

I'm still waiting for the day when someone implements a compiz plugin
that maps workspaces to non-orientable surfaces.  A mobius strip seems
like a good one.  Or surfaces of nonzero genus, like a torus or
something.  And of course, no reason to confine ourselves to a pathetic
three dimensions.  Imagine the possibilities of the Klein bottle
workspace switcher!

-Rob

On Mon, 2006-10-23 at 20:27 -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> Dan Winship wrote:
> > Compiz could still display the window on both cube faces, but the EWMH
> > doesn't provide any way of explaining that state to anyone else, so
> > other EWMH-based tools like the pager would see the window as being on
> > only one face at a time (and would show it as being truncated at the
> > edge of that face). (Admittedly, this problem exists in the viewport
> > model too, but only on the edge where the left and right sides of the
> > virtual desktop meet, rather than at every edge.)
> 
> There's already a workspace geometry provided to the pager, so I bet all 
> you'd need to convey to it is a single bool for whether windows overlap 
> in this way, and then when drawing the mini-windows on the 
> mini-workspaces change the clip region so it always includes all the 
> mini-workspaces instead of just one. Or something like that.
> 
> Even if this isn't fixed, it seems a like a not-very-bad bug. It's not 
> clear to me what I'd expect when a cube is mapped onto a 2D grid anyway ;-)
> 
> I don't know exactly how it would all play out, I just think it makes 
> life simpler if everyone pretends EWMH didn't have the second gratuitous 
> way to implement the same thing (workspaces). The only reason it exists 
> AFAIK is that some WM authors wanted to implement 
> workspaces-inside-workspaces, which I consider nuts.
> 
> I could flip a coin for whether windows should overlap workspaces (no 
> strong view), but I do have a strong bias against having two 
> slightly-different-but-almost-the-same concepts of workspace, one nested 
> inside the other...
> 
> Assuming that bias, there's no real point having two ways to implement 
> the one concept of workspace, instead you just want a flag for whether 
> windows overlap...
> 
> GNOME right now basically just pretends EWMH doesn't have the viewport 
> thing.
> 
> Anyway, not trying to push you around just offer historical context ;-)
> 
> Havoc
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