Re: new hint for EWMH

[Lubos Lunak <l lunak suse cz>]

On Friday 03 of August 2007, Tapani Pälli wrote:
> ext Lubos Lunak wrote:
> > On Monday 30 of July 2007, Tapani Pälli wrote:
> >> Hello,
> >> I would like to suggest a new hint '_NET_INPUT_AREAS' for EWMH to be
> >> used by window managers and toolkits. This hint would be a list of
> >> rectangles representing bounding boxes of the input methods on the
> >> screen. This allows a toolkit to place it's temporary windows (that
> >> might have input-entries) like popup-menu's so that they won't cover
> >> input-method areas and user can interact with those windows.
> >>
> >> I have suggested to have this patch for Matchbox window manager :
> >> http://bugzilla.openedhand.com/show_bug.cgi?id=333
> >
> >  I'm not sure I understand the purpose of the hint correctly - why not
> > simply add a new window type for these windows? Could you post a
> > description for the hint as it should be included in the spec?
>
> New Window type is fine for WM but a list of rectangles is much better
> toolkit-wise. Without this hint toolkit would need to go through whole
> window tree and pick input-method windows and then make collision
> detection logic. This is much heavier that having coordinates from the
> start.

 I see, I guess that makes sense. However that's only some kind of 
optimization, I think a window type is still needed to find out which windows 
create the regions. That's from somebody who has no clue about input methods 
though - from your suggested description I wouldn't have any idea how to 
actually implement the support.

-- 
Lubos Lunak
KDE developer
--------------------------------------------------------------
SUSE LINUX, s.r.o.   e-mail: l lunak suse cz , l lunak kde org
Lihovarska 1060/12   tel: +420 284 028 972
190 00 Prague 9      fax: +420 284 028 951
Czech Republic       http//www.suse.cz