Re: Some Thoughts/Rewrite of specs

[Michael ROGERS <M Rogers cs ucl ac uk>]

>if you use the task bar of iceWM or the bar of E at top of your screen,
>you have to place your icons manually, because when you use Arrange
>Icons from gmc, your icons are placed under the bar...
>The panel doesn't also know about this things on your screen and
>overdraw them everytime
>
>the same appears for the fvwm pager,the wharf, whatever...
>The wm`s should provide information about location and size that
>gmc/Gnome/Kde/XFCE/E can use.
>
>The panel should provide information when autohide is on for example,
>so that the wm could resize the maximized window when the panel is hidden.

 Maybe we could set a property on the root window, _GNOME_DESKTOP_DIMENSIONS 
or something, which would consist of four integers representing the origin,
width and height of the rectangular area in the center of the desktop not 
inhabited by panels, docks, dragbars etc. 

I'm sure there's a better way to explain that.  :)

 The panel and the window manager could update this property for each
other's benefit. For example, at startup, the window manager might create a
dragbar at the top of the screen, and it would set
_GNOME_DESKTOP_DIMENSIONS to describe the area not covered by the dragbar. 
When the panel started, it would check _GNOME_DESKTOP_DIMENSIONS to make sure 
the panel didn't cover the dragbar. It would then update the property to 
reflect the position of the panel(s). If you wanted to maximise a window, the 
window manager would simply set the origin, width and height of the window to 
the value of _GNOME_DEKSTOP_DIMENSIONS.


Michael Rogers