On Sat, Mar 06, 2004 at 12:26:32PM +0100, Tom Payne wrote: > Is this a stupid idea? Have I missed something about X that makes this > impossible?
No matter how much I'd like to think that Ion doesn't have any serious segfault bugs, I think it is a bad idea to have everything running on the shoulders of a single process, especially as there is very little that could be shared between the displays. (PWM1 actually just started a separate process for each X screen.) > Advantages over x2x: > - can switch between displays using keyboard (x2x requires mouse) I don't know how x2x works, but can't it be modified to support keyboard or just be called from a WM binding to do the switching? > - only one instance of window manager to use (e.g. you only have to press > quit once!) You could create a simple program that starts two instances of Ion (or any other WM) and when one quits normally, kills the other. In case of an abnormal quit, it could even restart the WM. > - the window manager can tell clients which display to appear on (by setting > DISPLAY when calling exec) rather than user having to do it by hand > (launch xterm, set DISPLAY manually, launch app) Hmm... what exactly is the problem here? Are you trying to start a program on a display that is not the "current" one? But I'd like to programs start in the frame that was current when the program was started. > Tuomo, do you think it's feasible for Ion3 by, for example, having a > WDisplay object as a parent of WRootWins, and then allowig multiple > WDisplays to exist? I don't know of any window managers that manage > multiple displays ;-) It is not an impossible amount of work, but I think there must be a better way, especially as I don't see this being a very much used feature. (In addition to the code to actually start managing multiple displays, the conversion should be a matter of including most of wglobal in the WDisplay and replacing references to this to first get it through some other objects. there are, however, some functions that have no object parameters and their usage would have to be changed, making things more complicated.) -- Tuomo
