Re: plugin support in metacity

[Rob Adams <readams gnome org>]

My thoughts on the plugin issue is that I'd rather avoid metacity 
plugins if at all possible.  The window manager needs to be 
low-maintainance for the user, and having to install plugins to get 
needed/desired functionality is kind of lame.

Expose-like functionality, incidentally, I don't see any problem with 
including into metacity itself.  This is not possible, however, until 
users are running a compositing manager built into metacity to display 
their desktop, and most likely until the actual compositing is being 
done in OpenGL.  Needless to say, given the current state of X (and the 
terrifyingly small amount of free time possessed by core metacity 
developers), this is still a ways off.

3DDesk is the same thing really.  Just as with expose, you can do it now 
but it would be slow beyond slow until everyone's on Xorg with hardware 
acceleration.

But, incidentally, the slow-beyond-slow way that will work today on X 
you can implement without too much difficulty without touching metacity 
source.  You would write your separate program, then bind a keypress in 
metacity through gconf to run a command that either runs your program or 
sends a message to a daemon process to activate the 
"workspace-switcher-extraordinaire-of-doom".  You can use the same 
keybinding for this that would ordinarily be bound to workspace 
switching or window switching.

libwnck has the necessary tools to switch workspaces or focus windows or 
perform other manipulations by communicating with any EWMH-compliant 
window manager.  So by using libwnck, your program will work with not 
just metacity but sawfish or KWin or enlightenment or afterstep or fvwm 
or openbox or...

Does this make any sense?

-Rob

Gregory Kovriga wrote:
> Hi,
> If I'm not mistaken libwnk is only the interface, but the actual 
> workspace switching occurs elsewhere (metacity?)
> So the visualization plugin would probably go there...
>
> Thanks,
> Gregory.
>
>
> Xavier Bestel wrote:
>
> > Le sam 25/09/2004 �7:52, Gregory Kovriga a �it :
> >  
> >
> > > Hi,
> > > is it possible to add (if doesn't exist yet) a plugin support to metacity?
> > > The general idea is that a plugin would be able to add additional visual 
> > > effects/functionality to the tasks performed by the window manager 
> > > without adding new dependencies to the core.
> > > Possible extensions might include:
> > > 1. desktop chooser plugin, similar to 3ddesk
> > > 2. full-screen application chooser, similar to expocity or kompose
> > >    
> >
> > I think what you're looking for is libwnck.
> >
> > 	Xav
> >
> >  
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> desktop-devel-list mailing list
> desktop-devel-list gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list