jdi@franz.COM (John Irwin) (05/01/91)
A customer asks: > Is it possible to get any of the following information from the window > manager? > > - the width of the border the WM draws > - the height of the title bar > - how wide a title bar would have to be to fit a specific title in > it. (i'd like to make sure that a window is wide enough for the full > title to be displayed) I remember asking this question a long time ago (unfortunately not long enough to be during the public review of the ICCCM however). I find nothing in the R4 version of the ICCCM that looks helpful. Does noone out there care much about placement of multi-window applications? Is the consensus that the user has to take control by providing Geometry resources? Or does everybody design their applications assuming a given window manager (and wm configuration)? -- John Irwin Franz Inc.
kk@shasta.tivoli.COM (Kerry Kimbrough) (05/02/91)
> Does noone out there care much about placement of multi-window > applications? ICCCM cares! It just doesn't care to explain the very best. See ICCCM 4.1.2.3, WM_NORMAL_HINTS. Use the win_gravity hint to position a specified corner/side of the box containing a fully-decorated top-level window at a given location. This can be exploited to coordinate the positions of related top-level's, even to create a limited form of tiling. (As always, no guarantee that these hints will be respected.) > > Is it possible to get any of the following information from the window > > manager? > > > > - the width of the border the WM draws > > - the height of the title bar > > - how wide a window would have to be to fit a specific title No. ICCCM is very conservative w.r.t. wm's. It only treats with properties and behaviors used by *all* wm's. There exist wm's without title bars, extra borders, etc.; ergo ICCCM has nothing to say about such decorations.
guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris) (05/03/91)
>There exist wm's without title bars, extra borders, etc.; ergo ICCCM has >nothing to say about such decorations. Had it provided a way of getting that information from the window manager, could a WM without those decorations have complied by saying that the width of the border, and the height of the title bar, is zero (and leave it up to the application to figure out that a zero-height title bar means "you don't get titles, so no matter how wide it is, a specific title won't show up")? Or would that still have had problems?
kk@shasta.tivoli.COM (Kerry Kimbrough) (05/04/91)
> Could a WM without those decorations have complied by saying > that the width of the border, and the height of the title bar, is zero > (and leave it up to the application to figure out that a zero-height > title bar means "you don't get titles, so no matter how wide it is, a > specific title won't show up")? Perhaps, but the logical extension of this approach is to make ICCCM the "union" of all WM protocols. Whereas the ICCCM aproach is more conservative, standarizing something like the "intersection" of all WM protocols. Conservative is almost certainly better for an X standard, for which upward compatibility and future extensions must be maintained for a rather long time. We may soon see a consolidation of WM concepts and an enlargement in the "intersection" of common practice, in which case you can urge your friendly neighborhood X Consortium to extend ICCCM.