Re: How to temporarily hide a window

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Tue, Jun 10, 2003 at 10:40:09AM +0200, Lubos Lunak wrote:
> 
>  See http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=59572. Basically, the problem is that 
> there's a window, which has 'always on top' set by the user (from KWin's 
> window operations menu), and this window gets hidden (=unmapped) temporarily 
> in order to take screenshot of the whole desktop, and then it gets shown 
> again. Now, since the spec suggests removing some properties because it 
> "helps legacy applications which want to reuse withdrawn windows" (and this 
> doesn't really apply only to legacy apps), the window has no longer the 
> _NET_WM_STATE_ABOVE flag after being shown again. The same problem is e.g. 
> with KSystemTray (when showing/hiding the mainwindow when clicking on the 
> tray icon), and even though I can't think of anything specific, I think there 
> are more cases like this.
> 
>  Does somebody have an idea how to temporarily hide a window without it having 
> all the state etc. properties reset?

I'm pretty sure there's a thread about this in the archives that
agreed on a solution. I know we discussed it for GTK+, at least, maybe
that's what I remember. I thought we discussed it here though.

Anyway, one option you didn't mention is having the toolkit retain the
state of the window. Though at a brief glance it looks like GTK will
get the PropertyNotify from the WM cleaning the window's state on
withdraw, and then remember the cleaned state.

I'd definitely say whatever behavior we decide on here, the toolkit
should insulate applications from it.

Havoc