Re: Some thoughts about window management
- From: Yaron Tausky <decaycell gmail com>
- To: Alex Graveley <alex beatniksoftware com>
- Cc: Mike Hearn <mike navi cx>, desktop-devel-list gnome org
- Subject: Re: Some thoughts about window management
- Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2005 22:10:52 +0300
On Wed, 2005-06-22 at 11:50 -0700, Alex Graveley wrote:
> Mike, I know you've looked closely at solving this, just wondering what
> I'm missing...
>
> Seems we could signal the app to show it's in-process menu at a given
> screen offset, with a given XID (the panel) as the parent, and avoid
> marshalling altogether?
>
> -Alex
>
> Mike Hearn wrote:
> >
> > b) It's hard to implement because (unlike in Windows) menus are not shared
> > between processes. So you'd need to define a marshalling format for
> > menus and then teach GTK+ to marshal any given menu, and then teach
> > the window managers what to do with it. Sounds like a lot of work and
> > complexity for relatively little gain.
The problem is that we have to merge two menus: the app's menu items,
the the WM standard functions. This can either be done by the app
(though I tend not to like it, as it relies on the app's good will and
prone to abuse), or by the panel -- either way one process has to tell
the other about it's menu structure (which can be quite complex --
labels, icons, toggle and radio selections, sub-menus, seperators etc.).
While I agree that this is a rather complex feature (that would have to
be formed and standardized in cooperation with other projects), I argue
that the gain isn't small at all. There are talks about a cross-desktop
applet specification, and that would require the implementation of this
feature too (so that we can have a "Remove From Panel" option that would
work on a Qt-based app, for example). This can be seen here[1].
Some serious work has to be put into the panel, but in the end we would
have cross-desktop applets, a notification area that is actually used
for notification, and a standard way to have apps running in the
background and leaving an icon as a dock. I think it worths it.
[1] http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Standards_2fSystrayAndAppletsMeeting
--
Yaron Tausky <decaycell gmail com>
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