On Fri, Sep 19, 2008 at 3:56 PM, Marco Pesenti Gritti <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Fri, Sep 19, 2008 at 9:43 PM, C. Scott Ananian <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Well, if there's only one window, and it's "stretchable", then your >> decision is easy. >> If it requests a fixed size, then you should probably decorate and >> float all the windows. I could also see floating all fixed size >> windows and tiling all "stretchable" windows -- that would make the >> 'gimp' work nicely; all the palettes would be floating and all the >> drawings would be tiled. And that's using only the "stretchable" >> hint. =) >> >> I'm not entirely opposed to adding new hints for oddball apps, but I'd >> like 99% of apps to work as-is, and from my review of the wms out >> there, it seems quite plausible that we can do this. >> >> FWIW, the wm itself can add hints based on window class for outliers, >> without requiring the outliers themselves to be changed. > > I see you mention three window managers on your page (including > metacity). It would nice to see a quick analysis of their > strengths/weaknesses for our use case...
I spent a while looking at documentation for all of them, but I need to schedule some hands-on experience time. Some moderate customization of the wm is probably necessary, since many of them ship with "power user" defaults with keyboard window switching, etc. The exact 'one virtual desktop per application' (well, maybe not a real virtual desktop, but roughly) use case doesn't seem to be out-of-the-box, but shouldn't be too hard. XMonad had erikg as a user & advocate, but I worry about maintaining a Haskell app. It does have a vibrant user community, though, and is easily customized. My feeling is that metacity will be hard to upstream patches to, and it would be more work to get working 'right', since it's pretty much designed *not* to be extensible. But it is the "default wm" these days. "awesome" seems to be on the ball wrt standards compliance, but is extended in Lua (yet another language) and I don't know anyone who uses it -- not that there aren't people, it just doesn't have a local advocate. "awesome" and "whimsy" are among those listed on http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/wm-spec -- whimsy is written in python, which I like, but seems immature, which I don't. whimsy also doesn't support the 'floating' layer necessary for apps like gimp. So, my initial impression was that "awesome" would probably work fine, but that if erikg or m_stone wanted to hack on "XMonad", I could easily be convinced of that, too. If "whimsy" sprouted decent support for floating windows, I'd seriously consider it; it would be nice to have a small hackable wm in our standard language. "awesome" was on the top of my list to hack around with when I get time and see if I could make it do the tricks I wanted it to do. > If we go with this approach, Sugar itself is likely to require small > or no changes and I can just let you and Sayamindu deal with all of it The main changes required, I think, would actually be to the shell code to make it happy running on a root window. There's some reparenting magic that's done to make that work right; I was pointed to the xpenguins source for information on what that involves, I don't think it's a lot that needs to be done. We might have to tweak the frame implementation so that it speaks the same standard wm-communication language as the window selectors in the gnome panel, if it doesn't already; haven't looked at that. And, of course, I wanted to switch sugar to using the standard X activity startup notification mechanism, and the standard desktop notification mechanism. Those aren't strictly required for the wm switchover, but would complete most of the work of making us a real citizen of the outside world. --scott -- ( http://cscott.net/ ) _______________________________________________ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar