[IAEP] Running regular X11 apps

[Marco Pesenti Gritti]

On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 6:13 PM, Sayamindu Dasgupta <sayamindu at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 9:40 PM, Marco Pesenti Gritti
> <mpgritti at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 6:01 PM, Jim Gettys <jg at laptop.org> wrote:
>>> On Fri, 2008-06-27 at 11:19 +0200, Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote:
>>>
>>>> There are ways we can implement different behavior for different
>>>> windows (for example the maximus approach could be extended to do so).
>>>> The problem is, how do we know which windows should be displayed
>>>> fullscreen (say the firefox or the gedit one) and which not (the
>>>> gimp)? afaik there is no window hint which could help us there...
>>>>
>>>
>>> There are ICCCM/EWMH hints to request full screen behavior, already
>>> implemented by window managers: e.g. totem or other video players use
>>> these routinely.
>>
>> Here we was discussing the approach used by maximus. They are
>> basically maximizing/undecorating windows whenever they are mapped (as
>> long as they are normal windows and not dialogs). Now this works for
>> something like firefox, but for gimp there is no hint that tells you
>> that the tools window should *not* be maximized.
>>
>> About the fullscreen hint. Sayamindu tried out that approach but he
>> run into problems. One of them was that panels are hidden by
>> fullscreen windows (and we made the sugar frame a panel). But I think
>> there was others.
>>
>
> Fullscreen seems to be significantly different from maximized +
> undecorated. The only sugar activity I can think of which uses
> fullscreen mode at certain times is Record.

All the activities can use fullscreen actually, it's in the base
class. In matchbox the effect is just that the toolbars goes away, but
if you runned them on a standard desktop they would actually be made
fullscreen.

My feeling is that the right approach here is to let the window
manager deal with the window sizing, on the base of the available
hints. That ways both activities and applications can behave in an
optimal way, depending on the window manager they run in.

The simplest implementation of this approach is maximus, i.e. the
window manager maximize all normal windows. This should work well for
most existing applications. For the side cases you'd have either to
get additional hints in the freedesktop spec or to use heuristics like
those David described.

Does it make sense? Can you think of better approaches?

Marco