Hi Eric,
I hope you are all doing fine!
I just subscribed to the "beta" mailing list a few hours ago, because
I had a few surprises the week before while trying to bring some
other Linuxer (a mathematician) to J. Maybe we can resolve the
problems with certain window managers this time around. At least
I found one cause which is provoking the misbehaviour:
I can demonstrate J's misbehaviour with twm(1) which is the window
manager coming with the core X11 system and which is the only WM which
is universally present -- also on your machines. Compared with later
WMs it may look a bit drab with the default settings but it is in fact
the X Consortiumm's reference implementation, i.e. it behaves correctly
with respect to things like application--WM interaction (as prescribed
in the "Inter-Client Communication Conventions Manual" (ICCCM)) and
geometry management.
With decorations enabeld, jwd runs almost fine: After invoking
"jwd", the window manager puts up the tentative frame for the .IJX
window for initial placement. J's first minor bug is that the
window will not materialzed where the user has chosen but warp into
the upper left corner -- this is not proper behaviour, the application
should take the WM's hint there. Likewise, the form window gets
warped to the upper left corner. While this is indicative of a
ICCCM violation and mildly annoying, it is not a show stopper for
running J. You can give this low priority.
The final jmz'' values in this case are:
5 5 25 5 21 31
2 2 24 2 21 31
0 0 21 0 21 31
Now for the interesting case:
Jwd gets the window sizes competely wrong when one disables all
so-called "decorations" which most window managers usually put
around applications by default: title bars, edges and corners
and/or extra buttons for actions like resizing a window. This is
a pretty common setting among the linux power users here. (No
fidgeting around with those tiny resize corners anymore -- key
bindings or using the mouse on the huge application area is so much
easier... and we reclaim all that space wasted on title bars back
for the actual application.) For twm(1), a ~/.twmrc line stating
NoTitle
will switch off the decorations. (Mouse button 1 on the root window
will give a menu with "Restart" entry which will reload the changed
.twmrc; the same menu also has entries for resizing/moving windows
without any decorations -- you don't need to define keyboard shortcuts.)
jwd will behave as follows without decoartions:
- the WM will put up the tentative winow frame for initial placement
in the correct size. Clicking the IJX into life will not just
cause the fluke warp into the upper left corner, it will also
shrink the IJX window to about a third of its usual size (at least
in my cases - YMMV).
- putting up the jma'' form window will put a zero or one pixel sqaure
with a minimal border into the upper left corner. (One has to move
the IJX window out of the way to detect the mini window at all.
- jamz'' then says:
5 5 25 5 21 31
2 2 24 2 21 31
522 310 265 300 21 31
The tests above were made with the new j6.02e-beta.
My guess is that you (or the Java libs) are taking the decoation
wrongly into account (or not enough into account) whee computing
your window sizes and postions.
Coincidentally I had already prepared a screen shot demonstrating
the zero-sized windows (using the j60*1*c-beta)::
http://www.gaertner.de/~neitzel/jwin-notitle.png
The two small specks near the upper right terminal corner are a
"plot" window and the "demo" menu, respectively. (After moving
them out of the screen corner.)
People in the linux crowd are generally open-minded for non-standard
languages such as as J. But they won't change their Window Manager
/ work environment just to be able to run J. J must be a well-behaving
X11 application or it doesn't get a first look. It would be great
if you could find where the geometry computations are made incorrectly.
I'll try a few of the other "insider WMs" in the next days, too,
(ratpoison, wmii, icewm, fluxbox, ion)
Greetings!,
Martin
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