xfdesktop -menu ?

[Brian James Tarricone]

Mathieu L said:

> I've just read the thread for a shortcut for rootmenu
> (http://lunar-linux.org/pipermail/xfce4-dev/2004-March/010292.html) and that's
> exactly what I'm looking for too, but unfortunately 'xfdesktop -menu` doesn't
> work for me (I'm running xfce 4.0.4) so could you please, pretty please, include
> this feature as soon as possible?

right, this is a feature in CVS only, not in the 4.0.x branch.  it seems like a pretty
low-impact addition, so i wouldn't mind backporting it for 4.0.5.  i'm out of town for
the rest of the weekend; i'll try to do it on monday.

> I have two very good reasons for that:
> - -first, I think one should not be obliged to grab his mouse to do something
> because it's very annoying when you're in the middle of writing a text or something
> like that.

i wouldn't necessarily agree with that.  there are certain tasks - menu navigation
included - that i think are better suited to a mouse than a keyboard.  however, keyboard
navigation is always nice ^_~.

> - -secondly, it is a real issue if you use rox --pinboard: even if there indeed is
> this option in rox to forward all the clicks on the background to the window
> manager, you're not gonna learn from me that the root menu isn't an xfwm4 event
> but an xfdesktop event. So there is no way to have the root menu or the windows
> menu with the mouse when running rox --pinboard, which is a pity IMHO (those
> menus are so neat!).
> But perhaps you think I should also talk about that with rox people?

right.  as it turns out, the menu responds to button click events not on the root
window, but on a virtual root window that xfdesktop creates, so passing mouse events to
the root window or WM wouldn't do much in this case.  putting superfluous stuff into the
WM like a menu system is a big no-no.  really, the intention is that you use xfdesktop
and xfdesktop only, but i certainly understand that it's insufficient if you want
desktop icons.  by 4.2 this will hopefully be a non-issue.

     -brian

p.s. as this stuff is somewhat general-interest dev stuff, please post to xfce4-dev
rather than emailing me personally.  that way, if olivier doesn't want me to add a new
feature to stable branch, he can smack me ^_~.