Re: "floating panel" window type

[Bill Wilson <billw wt net>]

On 16 Jun 2002 22:00:17 -0400
Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com> wrote:

> I have a constant stream of requests in Metacity bugzilla to have XMMS
> and gkrellm behave differently from others windows. So, need to sort
> out how these apps work within the EWMH framework
> (http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/wm-spec/). Otherwise there's no
> way to have WMs handle them correctly without the user manually
> configuring a bunch of stuff.
> 
> Basically the desired behavior is: 
> 
>  - stays on top of normal windows, but below its own dialogs 
>    and below FULLSCREEN windows and potentially below panels
>  - skips normal task list, but in Ctrl+Alt+Tab for panels
>  - sticky
>  - decorated or not according to Mwm decoration hint.
> 
> Probably the same behavior desired for "floating panels" in GNOME.
> Essentially small stuck-to-glass applications.
> 
> (Of course XMMS and gkrellm could have config options to optionally
> present themselves as normal apps as well.)
> 
> Assuming panels are always on top, a change I'm planning, XMMS and
> gkrellm could probably just set their type to DOCK and go with that,
> just like a panel. The one problem there is that DOCK windows are
> never decorated.

Hi, I've recently received a patch from a Gnome2 user that
adds options for sticky and the DOCK type (using the EWMH atom
_NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE_DOCK), so these features will be in the Gtk+-2.0
version of gkrellm.  Gkrellm has an option for allowing decorations,
but I see no problem with that being incompatible with DOCK mode.
I'll just make them exclusive or selectable.

> If we want WMs to have the freedom to implement a raise-on-mouseover
> type of policy for panels (as Metacity currently does), or want to
> have floating-control type windows that are decorated, we would need
> to add a FLOATING type or something to the WM spec to distinguish XMMS
> and gkrellm from other panels.

Let me know if anything affecting gkrellm develops here.

Bill

-- 
http://gkrellm.net <bill gkrellm net>