If I'm not mistaken the plan is to provide a shared library with code to draw the window decorations for applications (and toolkits) that want to use the "system theme". Fast, simple and consistent look if that is what you need. Probably the version of Xlib that talks to Wayland is going to pull a few tricks to run this decorator code in the application instead of the window manager.
Posted Apr 12, 2012 14:03 UTC (Thu) by glandium (subscriber, #46059)
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What if you don't want title bars at all?
LFCS 2012: X and Wayland
Posted Apr 12, 2012 14:29 UTC (Thu) by dgm (subscriber, #49227)
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Don't use the library. It's only a convenience.
LFCS 2012: X and Wayland
Posted Apr 12, 2012 21:41 UTC (Thu) by glandium (subscriber, #46059)
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I meant as a user, not as an application developer. I don't have titlebars in my tiling window manager.
LFCS 2012: X and Wayland
Posted Apr 13, 2012 9:29 UTC (Fri) by dgm (subscriber, #49227)
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Each Wayland's compositor should provide it's own library. In a tiling Window manager most functions would be stubs, because windows do not really need decorations.
LFCS 2012: X and Wayland
Posted Apr 15, 2012 18:06 UTC (Sun) by glandium (subscriber, #46059)
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It doesn't really look like it's designed this way... How would these libraries be linked anyways? Toolkits would link with a generic implementation, and different implementations would be LD_PRELOADed at runtime? (or something similar)
LFCS 2012: X and Wayland
Posted Apr 16, 2012 11:28 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
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It's more likely that the Wayland library would read a configuration file (or other configuration state) which would then give it the name of a plugin .so to load to implement the pluggable stuff.
But, noooo, it's better to force people to reimplement or fork the whole thing! Bah.
LFCS 2012: X and Wayland
Posted Apr 13, 2012 0:24 UTC (Fri) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402)
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"If I'm not mistaken the plan is to provide a shared library with code to draw the window decorations for applications (and toolkits) that want to use the "system theme"."
But is there no way of _forcing_ an application to use a users preferred decoration/manager?
LFCS 2012: X and Wayland
Posted Apr 13, 2012 5:21 UTC (Fri) by renox (subscriber, #23785)
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> But is there no way of _forcing_ an application to use a users preferred decoration/manager?
Look, most applications will use a toolkit, the toolkit will use a common way to draw the decorations (otherwise there will be a coherency issue), ideally a shared library.
This library will draw the decoration according to users preference and it must be very flexible, it's even planned for KDE to use *server side decoration* if I understand their plan well.
But no, there is no way to force an application (short of modifying it) to use all this, and *this is not an issue* because there are *now* lots of way for an application to misbehave but in practice this doesn't happen.
LFCS 2012: X and Wayland
Posted Apr 13, 2012 11:24 UTC (Fri) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263)
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>Look, most applications will use a toolkit
It's not about those that do, but about those which don't. Even if Qt and GTK start drawing the deco, there is still SDL and glut, for example.
LFCS 2012: X and Wayland
Posted Apr 13, 2012 11:39 UTC (Fri) by renox (subscriber, #23785)
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So? As I said above I don't expect that this will be a big issue because the 'social forces' which makes current applications look&behave 'identically' will still be here with Wayland.
LFCS 2012: X and Wayland
Posted Apr 13, 2012 5:31 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
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Strictly speaking, no.
However, you can set the default decorations to empty rectangles and have your compositor to draw whatever decorations it wants to do. Some applications might ignore the setting and do whatever they want, but that's how they behave right now anyway.
Additionally, you can do tricks like overlaying a gray rectangle over an unresponsive application and drawing large "KILL" button on it to immediately kill the hung application.
LFCS 2012: X and Wayland
Posted Apr 13, 2012 9:47 UTC (Fri) by dgm (subscriber, #49227)
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No, no way of forcing, the same way you cannot force the application to speak your language, or have icons that integrate with your preferred theme.
But you can always try embarrassing the developer in public for not doing things the right way :-)