On Wed, Jan 29, 2003 at 07:20:46PM -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote: > On Thu, Jan 30, 2003 at 01:18:55AM +0100, Matthias Clasen wrote: > > > > I guess if declare "Support history placement" within the scope of the > > EWMH, I would consider clients who do it themselves broken, just as I > > consider clients broken who "maximize" their windows by resizing to > > screen size. Well, they are less broken if they only use their own > > implementation as a fallback if WM support is not there, so you may have > > a point. But its still broken since I can no longer globally turn off > > history placement by simply switching to a wm which doesn't support it. > > > > We may want to go back to the older thread I started on this - I think > at some point we considered making the process application-driven, > e.g. the WM would set a property with serialized window state, and the > app would restore that property, the WM would unserialize the state > and apply it. So that keeps things in the domain of the application > while allowing the WM to define what "current window state" > is. However it has its own problems no doubt, I don't remember the > whole thread. > > Anyway, many apps already save/restore their own position, and I > believe that's the de facto reality if we add nothing to the WM > spec. So even right now, you can't disable placement by switching to a > WM that doesn't support it. > > Really the question we have to answer is, do we want to go to extra > effort to move this feature into the WM, or do we want to leave it > with the apps as it is now by default. I do think that 'history placement' would be well received and loved by masses. I recall in WindowsOS how some apps could save their position and others couldn't and it always annoyed me. On the other hand, there exist a plethora of tools to do stuff like place windows already. So the WM does not need to support 'history placement' to let users place windows where they want them. The one real advantage I see to 'history placement' is that it is implicit. You move the window, you close the window, you open the window, and its in the right spot. What I'm not sure about is that fact that we seem to be changing the default behavior for applications, which is going to break legacy apps. xterm was a good example of this. Now legacy apps that dont want to have their position remembered will be horribly annoying to use with this history enabled. There doesn't seem to be a happy middle ground to this problem however, as you want many legacy apps to save their position automatically too. So thats my thoughts on it all. Ciao, Ben -- I am damn unsatisfied to be killed in this way. http://www.icculus.org/openbox/
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