Re: Application-controlled window dragging

["Christian Hammond" <chipx86 chipx86 com>]

The piece of code I'm working on now is an experiment at the moment, but it will be part of a full-blown feature we're working on, one which I'm sure will be very popular. I can't talk about the feature in detail (unless either of you want to sign an NDA, which I can probably arrange), as it hasn't been announced yet, but not having this support will have a serious impact on this feature's usability.

We are planning to put some support in window managers for now just to test it. That won't do our end users any good though when the feature's released unless we can get it standardized and into several main window managers.

Christian

On 10/5/07, Matthias Clasen <mclasen redhat com> wrote:

On Fri, 2007-10-05 at 15:13 -0700, Christian Hammond wrote:

>
>
>
> The problem is, we won't necessarily know these restrictions before
> we're dragging. We only have some idea of them as we drag, as we hit
> them.
>
> If we go to a more traditional example, let's look at XMMS. It
> consists of multiple, separate windows that stick together while
> dragging. They have to handle move events themselves in order to
> guarantee the windows will stick together to bind them, and to move
> all the windows at the same time. They wouldn't be able to do this
> with _NET_WM_MOVERESIZE, and are forced to act in such a way where the
> window manager will have no idea that they're dragging.
>
> We have this problem to a much higher degree. Not only do we need to
> support this case, but more complex cases where windows can't reach
> positions on the screen. And we just don't know until the user tries
> to drag it there.

Before discussing mechanisms for doing this kind of stuff, how about we
start with a discussion of the usefulness.

What is the desired user experience here ?

Why should window managers implement very complicated protocols to
support something that is ultimatively not helping the user ?

Also, considering that you called this initially an experimental
project, I don't think this should this be incorporated in the spec
before we have even seen the outcome of the experiment. Wouldn't it be
much more natural to just patch some window manager to fit the needs of
your experiment ?

-- 
Christian Hammond - chipx86 chipx86 com
VMware, Inc.