Re: Proposal: _NET_WM_STATE_MINIMIZED

[Lubos Lunak <l lunak suse cz>]

On Thursday 17 of June 2004 19:46, Elijah P Newren wrote:
> On Thu, 2004-06-17 at 11:29, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > >  I personally think it'd be the simplest if we introduced
> > > STATE_MINIMIZED simply for telling the taskbar about the window's state
> >
> > What does STATE_MINIMIZED mean though, different from HIDDEN?
>
> This may be horrendously stupid (I just don't have enough experience
> with specs and window managers to know yet), but I'm throwing this idea
> out anyway:
>
> How about STATE_MINIMIZED = 'HIDDEN in "canonical" way'.  A current
> example of "non-canonical" hiding is SHADED, thus for now,
>    STATE_MINIMIZED = HIDDEN - SHADED
>
> another "non-canonical" hiding could come from what I understand Sun's
> Looking Glass stuff does; where the user could rotate the window depth
> wise so only the side of the window is visible, similar to closing a
> book and placing on a shelf.  Say we call this hiding method SHELVED.
> Then we would have
>    STATE_MINIMIZED = HIDDEN - SHADED - SHELVED
>
> Is that a useful idea at all?

 I don't think so, because you cannot find out the minimized state with this. 
First, if the app is not aware of the existence of SHELVED or whatever, it 
will detect even those states as minimized. Second, it's possible to have a 
window shaded and minimized at the same time[*], so you again can't recognize 
shaded normal from shaded minimized, which is what the KDE bug I referenced 
to was about.

 I think it'd be useful to have STATE_MINIMIZED, for WM->taskbar communication 
if nothing else. I'm pretty sure everybody here knows what a minimized window 
is, so I hope creating a proper description for it wouldn't be a problem. 
After all, if the spec has STATE_SHADED, why not having a state for minimized 
windows, which is much more common?

[*] BTW, it's also possible to have a window maximized and minimized at the 
same time, so the "Windows-style minimized/maximized/normal three-state 
model" is not really three-state.

-- 
Lubos Lunak
KDE developer
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