Re: Window History Placement

[Matthias Clasen <maclas gmx de>]

> > I guess we'd have to play around with Ben's implementation to see how it
> > feels in practise before we theorize further.
> 
> 	I know a number of people who use my implementation daily and who
> complain when they see problems.  (It's a small sample size so far, and
> obviously is a very developer heavy, so it's not a perfect trial.)  So
> far, the biggest complaint has been apps which either don't export
> enough information to save window history, and dialogs.  (My
> implementation doesn't save dialog positions.)  
> 
> 	The only application which has really encountered problems is glade. 
> This is because each new developer created window has the same title,
> class, and role settings.  Combine that with the tendency of developers
> to work with only one window at a time.  The window history mechanism
> places and resizes these windows which results in windows being
> displayed all the same size, which isn't correct.
> 
> 	Glade can easily be fixed by setting _NET_WM_SAVE_ID to be blank on
> these windows.  But there might be other applications which cause
> problems.  (Glade also sets UPosition on all it's control windows, but
> that's a different problem.)

If these are toplevels within on glade instance, the correct fix would be to
give each one
a unique role, as demanded by the ICCCM. 

One thing I wanted to ask you is how your implementation deals with
non-unique _NEW_WM_SAVE_IDs,
since those will probably occur in practice, even if the spec requires them
to be unique. Placing multiple instances of the same application at exactly
the same position would be problematic, since the user might not notice the
one hiding below. A fixed offset might be a pragmatic solution for the
placement problem, but which window gets to store its position under the given id ?
Wouldn't it be best to extend the numbering approach to _NET_WM_SAVE_ID ?

Matthias

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