[patch] xftaskbar doesn't respect fitts' law

Jasper Huijsmans jasper at moongroup.com
Sat Oct 25 12:54:31 CEST 2003


Op za 25-10-2003, om 04:37 schreef Mike Roome:
> currently, the taskbar has several pixels of "dead" space at the edge of
> the screen, which is highly annoying, and a terrible waste of prime
> screen real estate (see:
> http://www.asktog.com/basics/firstPrinciples.html#fitts's%20law )
> 

Terrible waste, indeed ...

> I've modified the code in xftaskbar.c to fix this problem, which causes
> a slight visual difference (the taskbar is flat, rather than 3d, since i
> removed the gtk_frame), and i probably missed a few things, since i'm
> fairly new to c, and completely new to gtk, but it seems to work
> flawlessly for me.
> 

The patch is fine, but there is a problem that the tasklist buttons and
the pager don't seem to be aligned properly. This is probably theme
dependent.

I made an alternative patch that uses a vbox instead of a frame and
added a 1x1 widget below the hbox (or above if the taskbar is on the
bottom). I believe this gives a better visual boundery between the
taskbar and the root window.

Opinions on the patch from other devs are very welcome. I'm not goping
to commit anything yet.

> It might also be worth looking into modifying the panel in a similar
> manner, if possible, but i haven't looked at the code for that yet to
> see if it would be as simple as it was for the taskbar.
> 

The panel is a free-floating widget. Using a flat widget without edges
looks unnatural and ugly. I want to find a solution for this, but it's
not easy.


> Mike Roome
> 
> PS. as a sidenote, i've been working on a few xfwm4 themes, how would i
> go about submitting them? just send to this list?

I think I would prefer to have a separate theme repository somewhere.
Perhaps we can simply use an exiting theme site, like for example
themedepot.org or freshmeat and advertise that on our website.

I don't really like the way we have all our themes stuck together in CVS
modules now. 

	Jasper


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