pusateri@macbeth.cs.duke.edu (Thomas J. Pusateri) (12/16/89)
Does the window manager under Openwindows 1.0beta2 and the new Openwindows 1.0 FCS always force the default geometry to be 0,0 for X applications? Under other window managers (uwm, awm) the application outline flashes and the user can position the application where ever desired. Although I am really pleased with the performance of Openwindows (nice job guys) I really would like to position my applications when they are started up. Thanks for any info. Tom Pusateri pusateri@nbsr.duke.edu
smarks@SUN.COM (Stuart W. Marks) (12/19/89)
| Does the window manager under Openwindows 1.0beta2 and the new Openwindows 1.0 | FCS always force the default geometry to be 0,0 for X applications? Under | other window managers (uwm, awm) the application outline flashes and the user | can position the application where ever desired. In short, the answer is no. Of course, the explanation is longer: The window positioning policy of OPEN LOOK, and therefore of the window manager in OpenWindows, is that the user is never asked to place the window with a flashing outline. Instead, the window either (1) comes up where the application asked to have it placed, or (2) windows come up offset from each other, progressing down a diagonal. Case (1) occurs if a geometry was specified on the command line, or if the program calculated a window position and sent it to the window manager. Case (2) is kind of like twm's RandomPlacement option. So, why do xterms always come up at (0,0)? Well, there's a bug in the R3 version of Xt that makes programs *always* ask to be placed. More specifically, in WM_SIZE_HINTS, the PSize and PPosition flags would always be set, and the (x,y) position would always be (0,0). The OpenWindows window manager believes these hints, and so the windows always come up at (0,0). This bug is fixed in R4. So, if you start up a bunch of R4 xterms under OpenWindows, they will come up offset from each other instead of at (0,0). The XView-based applications distributed with OpenWindows also will exhibit this offsetting behavior. | Although I am really pleased with the performance of Openwindows | (nice job guys) Thanks! | ... I really would like to position my applications when they are | started up. If you really want to position the windows like this, you can continue to run uwm. But if the problem is simply that all the windows come up at (0,0), you can specify a geometry argument on the command line, and the window manager will abide by it. This, combined with the fixes in R4, helps mitigate the "windows always come up at (0,0)" problem. Hope this helps, s'marks Stuart W. Marks ARPA: smarks@eng.sun.com Window Systems Group UUCP: sun!smarks Sun Microsystems, Inc.