billh wrote:
Any discussion of internal vs external window management cannot take
place without acknowledging the fact that we are talking about XWindows
operating within another window system, Cygwin/X. The immediate fact
here is that any action that a window manager takes that is synchronous
to the actions of the clients, such as on an xterm resize, when the
window manager may inforce an incremental sizing based on the character
width or heighth has to be handled in the window proc of the X server
running as a Windows client, otherwise the sequence of events cannot be
the same as in a native X Windows environment. In the case of window
resizing, the first order solution has the window being resized to any
arbitrary size by the Windows window system, and then a second event
where an external window manager would resize the window to a size based
on window hints registered with the X Window system. Though this can
happen very quickly, there are always side effects typically in older
programs that are perhaps more reliant on past behavior of X and even in
some cases certain window managers.
Okay, I'll fess up. I used to work for WRQ on the ReflectionX
server. We found that in fact there were financial reasons, meaning
enough customers, to support both approaches. Some customers wanted a
more Windows centric look and feel and some needed for compatibility
reasons an X window manager.
I'm not trying to discuss Win32 WM-proxy versus a true X Window Manager.
I'm simply comparing how the Win32 WM is implemented. I think most
people would prefer using the Win32 WM, if there were no compatibilty
problems. (BTW: what types of compatibilyt problems were there?)
What I am aiming toward is Windows-managed windows, but proxied in a way
that works more like a native X window manager. This means that most of
the WndProc handling needs to be handled by "Window Manager" code.
That's why I suggested WndProc Hooking.
I ported GWM to our environment and my associate Kyle went through the
ICCCM documents and made our Windows management mode honor all of that
documents guidelines for window management. This gave us both modes at
the flip of a switch in the control interface gui. For a commercial
product, we could justify both.
My idea is that WndProc hooking can allow you to turn the internal WM on
or off by adding/removing WndProc hooks (or possibly internal "hooks".)
I'm just suggesting that using the external WM approach will simplify
the code; it's rather messy right now.
THings may have changed, but i tend to doubt it.
PS
This is offered in the spirit of openness. I am not saying that you
should 'go commercial' for your X in Windows needs. Actually I am
currently working on a Linux on Windows product that has its own X
Server port via a frame buffer driver. Very cool! Don't port your
Linux code, run it natively!!!
Joe Krahn wrote:
What is the history of internal versus external Win32 WMs? It seems
that Cygwin/X is favoring the internal WM, even though the external WM
is a better fit to the X server design.
I was looking into adding some NET_WM/EWMH features (mainly icons for
now), and realized that most things have to be done differently on an
internal WM, meaning extra work making non-reusable code.
The current external WM is implemented using a proper X extension,
which might be the source of some problems with the external WM. Maybe
an efficient solution for the external WM would be to use WndProc
hooks, so that window message passing can be done natively instead of
through an X extension.
Joe
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