[rox-devel] CVS Pinboard Suggestions/Requests/Pleas

[Thomas Leonard]

On Mon, May 13, 2002 at 04:01:17PM -0400, Ryan Patrick Harris wrote:
> I've been testing the new CVS releases recently. I really was looking
> forward to alpha-blended icons and I must say, the filer looks
> beautiful.  
> 
> When the new pinboard was released, I thought it would be a good idea
> to give it a run. Let me start out by mentioning that I use Blackbox, and
> I believe some of my suggestions will be welcomed by other Blackbox
> users as Rox seems to have become the file manager of choice for many.  
> 
> Here are my three suggestions (pleas?):
> 
> 1) Allow configurable mouse button passthrough.  
> 
> Currently, the filer only forwards button 2 events to the window
> manager, regardless of the position of the pointer.  In other words,
> button 2 is forwarded to the WM even when the pointer is over an icon. 

> Here is the behavior I am looking/hoping for: button 2 passeed through
> to the WM (in whatever manner seems most intuitive), button 3 passed
> to the filer when the pointer is NOT over an icon, otherwise bring up the
> icons context menu. 

Isn't that what happens already? From the user's point of view, the icons
are part of the desktop, and so things should behave pretty much the same
whereever you click. Sawfish actually enforces this behaviour, grabbing
button-2 clicks whatever the filer does.

Passing button 3 clicks to the WM is possible, but it would mean you can't
clear the backdrop image if there are no icons, and other odd effects.

> 2)  Allow for command line setting of the pinboard background image. 
> 
> In the Blackbox world, a shell script, bsetbg.  Allows root pixmaps to
> be set in a generic fashion using the tool that meets your needs.  If a
> command line interface to the pinboards background image were created,
> this would be wonderful for Blackbox users.  
> 
> It seems that new filer instances communicate with a running filer, so
> this wouldn't bee too difficult? 

See Chapter 8 of the manual: 'The pinboard backdrop image'.
The example script given puts an auto-updating xearth image on the
backdrop.

> 3)  Set the atoms required for terminal transparency by terminals such
> as Aterm and Eterm. 
> 
> This would just be nice.  Right now I am setting both the file manager
> background and the root background separately by hand. I'm not sure if
> this is possible directly, but maybe an external application could be
> called to actually set the root background?  

Should be possible. I'm expecting eterm and friends to move to the new
true transparency system soon, though.

> Thanks for the great file manager.  I'm looking forward to comments,
> qestions.

Hope that clears things up :-)


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