Re: Toplevel keybindings

[Mark McLoughlin <mark skynet ie>]

Hi Malcolm,

On Fri, 2003-02-07 at 15:08, Malcolm Tredinnick wrote:

> The problem with the approach your are broaching, Mark, is that a GNOME
> desktop will be explicitly unable work fully with any window manager
> that is not Metacity, no matter how spec-compliant the window manager
> is. Any other ideas on how to avoid this?

	Yeah, I know - I don't expect the way its currently done to be the way
we do it in the end, it was just a way of giving the thing a go. I only
really see a few possible solutions:

	1) As you suggest, we move some of these keybindings configuration to a
more central place and any window manager can pick up on that.

	2) We come up with a ClientMessage protocol for the panel so that
window managers who already have keybindings for these types of things
could bind these keys and drive the panel with the protocol.

	3) Give up, and say "If any window manager wants to work with this,
someone needs to send me a patch that will detect that that WM is
running and figure out the keybindings for that WM".

	I think (1) is the best plan. (2) just adds unneccessary complexity
IMHO, it places the burden of interpreting what the equivalent panel
operation for a given keybinding is and I doubt we could come up with a
spec that would give use GNOME/KDE interop. (3) is what we have at the
moment - not just in the panel, but in the keybindings capplet - and
isn't a good idea for obvious reasons.

Good Luck,
Mark.