Re: _NET_WORKAREA and dual head

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

Lubos Lunak wrote:

> On Tuesday 16 of March 2004 03:38, Billy Biggs wrote:
>  
>
> >  I agree that our problem is much simpler if we have rectangles fixed
> > to a screen edge, and that reserving space in the middle of a monitor
> > does not make sense.
> >    
>
> Hmm, ok then.
>  
FWIW I can see some accessibility use cases for reserving
rectangular areas within the screen, in support of
"always on top" sorts of applications like onscreen magnifiers and
virtual keyboards.

However I do appreciate that this complicates matters a good bit
when it comes to implementing support for these sorts of "struts",
and I am not sure how essential such a capability is above and beyond
the existing "reserve edges/corners" behavior.

There are however only four edges to the screen; as more applications
begin to use STRUTS we start to run into problems.  For instance,
GOK's onscreen keyboard currently requires that the user have only one
"panel" for proper operation. ( GOK == Gnome onscreen keyboards for 
users who
cannot use a physical keyboard, or in situations such as kiosks where
no physical keyboard is present).

How should we handle the case of a Xinerama screen, on which we choose to
place separate per-"head" panels or other STRUT utilities?  This would 
require
the more general usage of STRUTS if, for example, one had three tiled 
screens
and wished to reserve separate space on the middle physical display.

I guess the upshot is that I think _if_ we can create a more general api for
reserving screen space, it might be preferable, even if it's more work.  
It's not
impossible to think of real use cases for it, and where accessibility is 
concerned it
becomes more important to enable these behaviors since the end-user may be
unable to modify window placement manually.

regards,

- Bill

>  
>
> > Rob Adams (readams readams net):
> >    
> >
> > > I think that a rather simple extension to _STRUT_PARTIAL, though,
> > > would be the easiest solution.  We could add a xinerama number to the
> > > hint specifying that it should apply to just one xinerama.  This would
> > > mean that existing WMs would have to be changed very little to achieve
> > > essentially the same effect.  The only loss would be the ability to
> > > set a "reserved area" in the middle of the screen, which I think is
> > > really not a loss at all.
> > >      
> >  I think this proposal makes the most sense.  Is there a good way we
> > can add this while keeping compatibility?
> >    
>
> Well, given that 1.3 is not official yet, we could simply change it, in case 
> it's not yet widely used.
>
>