Hello all, Marco and I have been discussing on how to make a window manager like Metacity fit into the Sugar environment, and based on our current discussions, as well as past discussions, it seems clear that we need changes to the Extended Window Manager Hints spec[1]. For details on why we want to do that, take a look at the first draft of the proposal at http://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/sugar_metacity/draft_1.txt
The simplest way to do this is mentioned in the draft, namely, to have a new _NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE hint, called _NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE_NETBOOK_APP (feel free to suggest a better name :-P). All sugar activities are hinted as _NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE_NETBOOK_APP, and the window manager maximizes and undecorates them. However, Marco suggests that for applications like Firefox, or Thunderbird, we may actually want them to be in maximized+undecorated in Sugar as well, to maximize screen real estate usage. In such a situation, things become a bit more complicated. Marco suggests a double hint, some thing like _NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE_NORMAL | _NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE_APPLICATION. In a "normal" desktop environment the second _NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE_APPLICATION will not have any effect, but in Sugar, _NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE_APPLICATION will be honoured, and windows having this hint will be maximized + undecorated. However, this brings up two problems a) applications like firefox will need to be modified so that they set the _NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE_APPLICATION hint (ideally we would like to run the applications unmodified). b) one of the major reasons why we can do away with the decorations in case of sugar activities is that they are designed to work well without decorations (eg: a large close button on the window itself). otoh, most desktop applications do not have this, and the close button is usually somewhere hidden in the menu. In some cases the close button may not be accessible at all (eg: a rogue popup in firefox which somehow circumvents the popup blocker and disables the menubar). Note that this is a problem with the existing Firefox activity as well. We would like to have inputs and suggestions on this issue before going ahead and making a proposal to the EWMH maintainers. Thanks, Sayamindu [1] http://standards.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/wm-spec-1.3.html -- Sayamindu Dasgupta [http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings] _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel