Re: Decorations (again)

[raster rasterman com]

On  6 Nov, Matthias Ettrich scribbled:
->  
->  Hi,
->  
->  the first time we discussed decorations, it looked like there was a small
->  majority to keep and to support exclusively the MOTIF hints.
->  
->  Later I had the feeling the most people are open to replace them with something
->  better, integrated in the NET specification. This will also cause a little
->  speedup (one roundtrip less), remember, all client window information of the
->  net protocol can be read in one stream (even the icons ).
->  
->  One of the problems I see with the MOTIF hints is there visual nature. They
->  give applications control to decide what kind of buttons or functions shall be
->  visible on the window decoration. This is a concept directly taken from
->  Windows-2.0, I assume, and doesn't fit well into the X world where window
->  managers are the ones responsible for window decoration and window management.
->  
->  So the basic idea is to introduce a *logical* decoration hint. Last time we
->  discussed that I wasn't very creative finding logical window groups. We
->  basically had the three visual groups:
->  
->         - normal windows ( the WM already knows if something is a dialog with
->                                       the transient_for hint)
->  
->        - toolwindows (usually smaller decorations )
->  
->         - windows that do not want to be decorated (but managed to gain focus
->                  handling. Panels and such are in this cathegory).
->  
->         - windows that do not want any decoration but want to be resizeable by
->               the wm with a tiny frame (floating toolbars, etc.).
->  
->  
->  Not very logical, I admit, but practical. Will cover a lot of cases, but
->  there's more to it:
->  
->  What about the additional groups:
->  
->        - message box
->        - critical message box
->        - error message box 
->          ( these hints may also influence the WMs activation behaviour)
->          
->  
->  Raster, last time we talked about that you mentioned you have other window
->  groups in mind. Any suggestions?

Definitely:
Filemanager view window (you might not want certain decorations on a
filemanager view window)
Pager window (kwm and E both use separate windows for the pager(s) so a
different border woudl be useful)
Iconbox (E uses a separate iconbox to hold iconfied window s- fvwm2 has
the similar module - the Icon Manager window)
Menus (for "pinned menus" ala Tk, Gtk's pinnable menus etc.)


->  Another topic are modal dialogs. Can't remember whether we discussed that. I
->  was wondering whether a hint MODAL_FOR (similar to transient_for) may be useful.
->  It would give the WM a hint which window to activate (there's no point in
->  activating a window that has a modal_for window open).
->  
->  
->  Matthias
->  
->  

-- 
--------------- Codito, ergo sum - "I code, therefore I am" --------------------
The Rasterman (Carsten Haitzler)    raster@rasterman.com     raster@valinux.com
                                    raster@enlightenment.org raster@linux.com
				    raster@zip.com.au