Proposal for a general setup panel (overview)

[Thomas Leonard]

On Sat, Aug 17, 2002 at 11:32:09PM +0200, Olivier Fourdan wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Back to work after 3 weeks. I didn't work on xfwm4 lately, but I still
> used (some) of my brain.
> 
> I came with a proposal. Here comes the highlights :
> 
> - We standardize on xsettings protocol for all settings (note this
> doesn't include apps data such as xfce4 menus for example)
> - We need to write our own xsetting manager
> - A tree view will give access to all option, ordered by applications.
> - It will be modular. Every application that wants to use it will have
> to provide a plugin for the xsetting manager. That plugin will be in
> charge of loading/saving specific settings and display part of the GUI.
> - to call the GUI, from the application, the application will set a
> specific atom (X11) to an hidden window belonging to the xsetting
> manager and then send a synthetic MapRequest event to that window (using
> XSendEvent). The role of the atom is to provide the specific module to
> display. E.g., xfce4 wants to display its setup panel, more specifically
> the option for the panel position, it will first set the atom
> XFCE_SETTING_MODULE to "apps/xfce4/position" and send an XEvent to a
> given window.

So... the user chooses 'Settings...' in the application, which sends a
message to the XSettings manager, which runs the plug-in provided by the
application, which displays its settings?

Won't the options window be rather big, with all the options from every
application in it? (ROX-Filer's box is pretty big, and that's just one
app!). How about having a central list of applications in one window, but
having the application open a full screen options window when clicked.
Then you don't need any plugins, just execute 'xfwm4 --options' or
something.

I'd like to use xfwm4 from ROX, but it would need an options box that
works on its own...


-- 
Thomas Leonard			http://rox.sourceforge.net
tal00r at ecs.soton.ac.uk		tal197 at users.sourceforge.net
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