Re: primary screen WM property?

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Christopher Blizzard <blizzard redhat com> writes:
> Both the Mac and Windows have the ability to label a screen as the
> primary screen.  This would be the window where you would find the
> toolbar, the window that new windows usually come up on, etc.
> Xinerama doesn't have an API that describes a specific screen as the
> primary screen, and the newer Xinerama APIs on sourceforge don't
> appear to, either.

In the sourceforge specs there is this very poorly defined "center
hint" thing that IIRC is maybe supposed to convey that.

(See the list archives, I was bitching about this hint a bit and there
were some explanations of it in there.)

> It would be nice if there was a way to describe one of the screens
> with Xinerama as the primary one so that toolbars could be properly
> placed and new windows would come up on that primary window.
> 
> In theory, we could just create a property on the display that said
> which one of the screens is the primary.  The WM spec seems like a
> good place to do this since the WM is responsible for window
> placement. Sound reasonable?  The property description should probably
> be dead simple.
> 
> What do folks think?

You need to clarify who sets the hint and who reads it. i.e. what is
the interclient communication here.

I can imagine solving this by just having a WM configuration setting
that modifies the placement algorithm, with no need to communicate
outside the WM.

If there is communication between clients, is the WM setting a hint
for clients that want to do self-placement, or what.

Havoc