Loren M Lang <lorenl_at_alzatex.com> wrote
on Mon, 16 Jun 2003 00:33:12 -0700 (PDT):
>
> Subject: FVWM: Window Position
>
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Whenever a new window or dialog box
> pops up, fvwm tries to find the least
> covered area to place it. I've had
> fvwm setup to do this for years now
> and have always liked it, but recently
> I've setup a new linux box with a good
> monitor and video card. Previously,
> I've always run linux at 1024x768 or
> 800x600 depending on what my monitor
> could do, but now I have a massive
> 1600x1200 desktop and love it. The
> only problem now is that certain
> dialog boxes that are created very
> far away from their parent windows,
> is there some way of controlling
> placement of windows based on parent
> child relationships? I really like
> how new and unrelated windows are
> placed but it is realing annoying
> moving my mouse clear across the
> screen just to click the ok button
> on an informative dialog box.
I have the same issue, in fact even worse: on a 3200x1200
desktop the other side is a long way away :-(
I have long thought of implenting a solution like MacOS X, where
dialogs pop down from the title of the parent app. There
are reasons why this is hard in X, but I hacked up a module to
test how I could do it. See:
http://cns.georgetown.edu/~ric/software/fvwm/FvwmPlaceTransient.tar.gz
This doesn't work a lot of the time for a number of reasons, mainly:
- some apps create transients that have the root window as owner
rather than the real parent; we can't do anything about these
- there is a flicker as fvwm places the window, then the
FvwmPlaceTransient module moves it
- there is probably a race condition between fvwm and the module
It does work for most galeon dialogs, which is about 95% of all
dialogs for me, and allows me to warp focus and dismiss the dialog
with the keyboard while surfing.
I think it would be a good idea to integrate this into fvwm to avoid
the last two issues. We could maybe fake our way out of the first
by having a config, something like this:
Style "dialog_print" TransientFor "galeon"
We could even have the dialog windowshade out of the titlebar, and
similar eye candy.
If I have time later in the summer I may try to implement this.
That's a big "if", I'm afraid :-(
Cheers
Ric
Richard J Lister
Dept of Neuroscience
Georgetown University Medical Center
http://cns.georgetown.edu/~ric/
--
Visit the official FVWM web page at <URL: http://www.fvwm.org/>.
To unsubscribe from the list, send "unsubscribe fvwm" in the body of a
message to majordomo_at_fvwm.org.
To report problems, send mail to fvwm-owner_at_fvwm.org.
Received on Wed Jun 18 2003 - 14:07:37 BST