[REQUEST] Minimize Windows into Desktop Icons

[Jasper Huijsmans]

On Tue, Feb 03, 2004 at 09:48:35AM -0500, Brian J. Tarricone wrote:
> On Tue, 3 Feb 2004, Matthew Weier OPhinney wrote:
> 
> > -- Brian J. Tarricone <bjt23 at cornell.edu> wrote
> > (on Monday, 02 February 2004, 09:28 PM -0500):
> > > pulling the menu out of xfdesktop isn't an option - the part that 
> > > listens for mouse clicks in order to know when to pop up the menu is a 
> > > huge invisible window (the desktop itself).  if xfdesktop has that 
> > > focus, rox won't respond to clicks for the icons, and if rox has the 
> > > focus, xfdesktop can't bring up the menu.
> > 
> > Then how does deskmenu do it? I know I can configure it to listen for
> > specific button clicks -- but where is it 'listening' for those?
> > 
> > Another case: *box window managers all have a root menu. I can tell ROX
> > to pass botton clicks to the window manager, and doing so enables the
> > window managers to receive the clicks. (Note: I _cannot_ do the same
> > thing with xfdesktop.)
> 
> interesting.  i didn't know they did that.
> 
> > I guess what I'm wondering is, why is it possible for deskmenu and these
> > window managers to popup their menus without direct access to the root
> > window, but not possible for the xfdesktop root menu?
> > 
> > I'd look into it myself, but I've never done C.
> 
> i'm not really sure how rox is doing it, probably some X magic, or 
> possibly by messing with the gdk event mask.  i'm not too knowledgeable 
> about the event stuff, so i suppose i started shooting my mouth off 
> without completely knowing what i was talking about - sorry 'bout that.  
> at any rate, rox is a gtk2 app, just like xfdesktop, so if you can 
> figure out how to do it with rox, it's likely that the fix for 
> xfdesktop will be similar.  this isn't something i'm going to get to 
> for a while, so if you or someone else wants to look into this, that 
> would be best.
> 

Let me try to comment on some of these issues.

ROX is forwarding X events that it does not handle itself to the real
root window.

To get the menu to work like deskmenu you have to use an XEvent loop
instead of a gtk one. Botsie tried that long ago, but the xfdesktop code
is much easier to maintain.

Most stand-alone window manager implement their own menu, xfwm4 does
not.

The easiest solution for using the ROX pinboard and a menu is to write
menu support for ROX ;-)

I dont think XFce is ready to incorporate the Choices system and use
AppDirs, which make real integration with ROX not a likely option.  

	Jasper