[sugar] Supporting desktop applications, extending the EWMH spec

[C. Scott Ananian]

On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 4:07 PM, Sayamindu Dasgupta <sayamindu at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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

I think you are confusing the role of the Window Manager.  When I run
sugar under metacity, I don't *want* my activities to be full screen.
When I use a windowing wm, I expect them to be in (decorated) windows.
 Ideally, the sugar home view would run on root, like in nautilus.

On the XO, we are using a special tiling window manager.  You can use
a window manager like XMonad on your non-XO if you want that style of
window management.  That's a window manager property, sugar activities
should have nothing to do with it.

When I'm running Browse in my window, and then select Fullscreen mode,
*then* it applies the full screen hint, and really *does* run full
screen.  This is just like Firefox does.

Some of the links at the top of
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0#Suggestions_from_User:CScott point to
window managers we could run on the XO to provide better support of
the 'each activity has a full screen' window management mode.
Further, they offer better support of 'floating layers', so that an
application like the gimp can have a 'full screen' layer all to itself
*in which* it can have several different (decorated) windows.
Something like having a dedicated virtual desktop per activity.  I
suppose we could add a new hint for some activities indicating which
of their multiple windows (if any) should be the 'background' one
mapped full-screen, but I believe the existing hints are adequate.
Playing around with the gimp in XMonad may be instructive.
 --scott

-- 
 ( http://cscott.net/ )