Re: Window History Placement

[Lubos Lunak <l lunak suse cz>]

On Thursday 09 of January 2003 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.

 I don't understand why such property would be needed. WM_CLASS+WM_WINDOW_ROLE 
are supposed to uniquely identify every window in an application (+PID if 
needed). In one of the URLs above I only saw that there might be some 
problems with role, but not what problems, and I don't see how adding this 
extra property is going to fix the problem, whatever it is.

-- 
Lubos Lunak
KDE developer
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