Re: Proposal: _NET_WM_STATE_MINIMIZED

[Lubos Lunak <l lunak suse cz>]

On Monday 21 of June 2004 21:11, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> On Mon, 2004-06-21 at 13:18, Lubos Lunak wrote:
> >  Is it? HIDDEN means hidden in any way. MINIMIZED is when I click that
> > little button near the upper-right corner, which makes the window to be
> > gone and accessible only using the taskbar or things like Alt+Tab.
>
> When would you use this? It's not right to use it for whether to display
> something as minimized in the task bar; the task bar (I think) should
> display something as minimized if it's HIDDEN, not if it got hidden via
> this specific mechanism.

 That'd mean the taskbar would display as minimized even shaded windows, or 
those shelved windows as Elijah used as an example (rotated to the screen 
side). But as far as I can say the intention of the KDE taskbar is to show in 
a different way only minimized windows.

>
> If we just s/_NET_WM_STATE_HIDDEN/_NET_WM_STATE_MINIMIZED/ in the spec
> does that solve the problem? ;-)

 Most probably. But then of course there's the question why it hasn't been 
named that way since the beginning. And after reading the thread on 
STATE_HIDDEN vs STATE_MINIMIZED that lead to introduction of STATE_HIDDEN I 
believe the intention of STATE_HIDDEN was different than what I want.

 STATE_HIDDEN, as far as I can say, is supposed to mean "the window is hidden, 
somehow", and it's purpose seems to be distinguishing IconicState windows on 
inactive virtual desktop from IconicState windows that are minimized, shaded 
or whatever. In other words, STATE_HIDDEN means "pager, don't show this".

 What I'd want is a STATE for the state in which a window is after you click 
the one titlebar button. That's clearly different from STATE_HIDDEN. We could 
perhaps change the meaning of HIDDEN to

 "old" HIDDEN = STATE_SHADED | "new" STATE_HIDDEN (i.e. minimized) | whichever 
else state shouldn't be shown in the pager

 but I think we really don't need to change things even more.

 Adding STATE_MINIMIZED seems fine to me. It'd be almost like STATE_SHADED, 
with no complications.

>
> >  Come on, everybody knows what a minimized window is. That button in the
> > upper-right corner, you know :). If the spec has SHADED, why not
> > MINIMIZED?
>
> HIDDEN already serves the purpose, doesn't it?

 No, if HIDDEN has a generic meaning which includes also other states than 
minimizing.

> What's actually broken right now? The only bug we've identified is this
> minor confusion about whether a shaded window is hidden. GNOME and KDE
> both say yes now, but we can change it to no.

 That'd mean changing the meaning of STATE_HIDDEN. Adding STATE_MINIMIZED 
seems a better solution to me.

>
> Right now all the desktops and WMs are doing things the same way, it's
> interoperable, it's backward compatible. It's not how we would have
> designed it from scratch, but it does work.

 Hmm, ok. I guess I got a bit carried away there.

-- 
Lubos Lunak
KDE developer
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