Re: Infinite desktop todo ideas

[Jeremy Hankins <nowan nowan org>]

Teika Kazura <teika lavabit com> writes:
> On Thu, 23 Jul 2009 12:50:50 -0500, Jeremy Hankins wrote:

>> The point of infinite-desktop, as I understand it, is (a) to be
>> flexible about viewport boundaries (i.e., the "infinite" part), and
>> (b) to use the mouse to move around.
>
> On point (a), smooth boundary and infinite-ness are independent. You
> can limit the entire desktop size to 6x6, and let it scroll smoothly.
>
> I didn't notice the seperation of mouse from smoothness. Yes, it's
> possible to use keyboard to scroll viewport.

Yes, but does smooth-scroll make sense when using the keyboard?  I
briefly tried using a function to smooth-scroll via keyboard (basically
a wrapper for set-viewport to keep the mouse in the same place relative
to windows), but I eventually decided it was pointless, even when set to
scroll in half-screen steps.  (If anyone disagrees and would like a copy
of what I used to do it I still have it.)

>> But to do it right it should update viewport-dimensions, etc, and
>> interact properly with the pager.
>
> Sawfish-pager is already ok for smooth scroll and viewport dimension
> change. But I don't know for other pagers.

But infinite-desktop doesn't update viewport-dimensions and
viewport-[xy]-offset, which means that when you scroll outside of the
(old) viewport-dimensions you scroll off sawfish-pager too.  My guess
(though I haven't checked) is that this is also the source of the
warp-to-window bugs mentioned in the code.

> If you're interested what exactly viewport is, read ewmh:
> http://standards.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/wm-spec-latest.html
> (I haven't read it ;). You may have to refer icccm:
> http://tronche.com/gui/x/icccm/ (they provied tarball, too.)

Thanks.

> If I understand correctly, there's no limit, from X viewpoint, of the
> "large desktop" size from the beginning. It's Sawfish that devides the
> desktop by screen size, puts VP coordinates like (0, 3), and imposes
> the upper limit on VP coordinates.

And a lower limit at 0x0.

-- 
Jeremy Hankins <nowan nowan org>
PGP fingerprint: 748F 4D16 538E 75D6 8333  9E10 D212 B5ED 37D0 0A03