Re: Window History Placement

[Matthias Clasen <maclas gmx de>]

So this is the "WM saves" strategy, which has the advantage that the WM
controls what gets saved, but doesn't allow to keep history across WM
changes (unless we standardize file formats and locations...). This is
probably an acceptable price to pay for getting this to work reliably
for all applications. 

Will I still be able to do xterm -geometry 90x60, or will this come up
with the geometry stored under XTerm/xterm//99 ? Granted, new
applications could be made clever enough to set an empty
_NET_WM_GEOMETRY_SAVE_ID if cmdline args are present, but what about
legacy apps ? And setting an empty save id has the effect of not storing
the geometry at all. Is there a way to have a cmdline-specified geometry
stored, or is that not a relevant use case ? One idea would be to change
or remove the save id after mapping the window. How does your
implementation behave in that case ? Should the behaviour in that case
be specified ?

Does this interfere in any way with SM ?

Small nitpick: Since you're saving more than just geometry, the property
would better be named _NET_WM_SAVE_ID.
 

Matthias


On Thu, 2003-01-09 at 23:24, Benjamin Kahn wrote:
> I'm writing a patch for Metacity which adds window history as a
> placement method.  
> 
> You can find a description of my patch at:
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/showattachment.cgi?attach_id=13455
> 
> You can find a discussion of the patch at:
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=91481
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=81802
> 
> and the patch itself at:
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/showattachment.cgi?attach_id=13452
> 
> The biggest problem I had when saving window state is trying to find a
> unique way to identify a window.  I eventually came up with an internal
> numbering system.  Windows are identified by class/name/role/number
> where number is simply an integer which grows as similar windows are
> placed on the same virtual desktop.  This seems to work very well.
> 
> However, I needed a way for applications to control window history a
> little better.  Some applications want to remember their own window
> state and other applications want to make sure the window manager treats
> a certain window the same each time and do not want windows to be
> numbered.
> 
> Havoc suggested a window property called: _NET_WM_GEOMETRY_SAVE_ID.  If
> this property is set with a string, my patch uses that as the history
> identifier.  If the property is set with an empty string, my patch does
> not save any state for the window at all.
> 
> It seems like this would make a nice addition to the window manager
> specification.
> 
> 
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