Subject: FVWM: FvwmDecor

From: Kendrick Vargas <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 8 Dec 1996 00:33:17 -0500 (EST)

Hi,
	I'm officially apologizing for spamming this list now if what I am
about to present has already been discussed. I would also like to say that
I am no programmer, and I probably won't be one any time in the near
future... Ok... here's my idea...

	I've noticed a proliforation of window managers based on either
fvwm or fvwm2. There's AfterStep (originally bowman), Enlightenment,
Fvwm-95... and I'm sure there are others that I haven't even seen or
thought of... 
	I was wondering if maybe it wouldn't be a better idea to make a
new module called FvwmBorder which would handle decorations and stuff like
that... Then, you can have the modules recognize a certain file type which
contains a description of the borders... the way they look ... etc... I
haven't really played with fvwm2 a whole lot, but I'm thinking you could
have something like this:

*FvwmDecorBorderPath /usr/local/lib/fvwm2/borders:/home/myhome/fvwm2/myborders
*FvwmDecorBorder	enlightenment
*FvwmDecor etc...etc... 

and you could set up the window manager in such a way that in itself, it
has some simple standard, and through this module, you can expand the
Decorations and choose what you like without say having to recompile or
compile a new window manager which you like better... 
	You would be able to specify ... lets say... a borders directory
or a decor directory which would contain the files for the FvwmDecor
module to decorate windows for your session... You could set it up in such
a way so that you could just switch Decorations on the fly without having
to have two seperate .rc files... 
	I am suggesting this for two reasons: 1) it would probably make
fvwm2 smaller memory-wise (which I believe was one of the original goals
of fvwm) and 2) it would definitely take up less space on my hard drive :)
There are many "based on fvwm2 and really close to it, just looks sorta
different" window managers out there and I think it'd be benificial to the
authors if they didn't have to change some of the functionality and then
have to re-release it as something else cuz they can't work a patch or
something into the major distribution of fvwm2... It would probably also
make it easier from an administration standpoint, the ability to offer
your users many looks without having a whole bunch of binaries to
install...
	Thanx for your time... If this seems stupid, please be nice about
it, don't flame me to high heaven... Thanx for your consideration...
			-peace

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"Life is when you shake it" -- me

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From: Allen Brady Montz <[email-masked]>
Date: 08 Dec 1996 09:41:04 -0700

> have something like this:

I see no need for an apology. I think this is needed. I was planning on
waiting until after the final 2.0 release came out before diving into this.

I'm not sure that this is best done with a fvwm module though. There's a lot
of back and forth that has to go on between the code that draws the borders,
and the rest of fvwm. It might be best to start off just thinking about it as
a shared library. That way it'll be easiest to begin the process of teasing
out the decoration specific code. Once that's done, if it turns out to be
easily put in a module, then cool. 

This also requires rewriting the fvwm style code, and adding the ability to
specify styles that fvwm doesn't even know about. For example, suppose we're
making an fvwm95 module, and that fvwm didn't have miniicons. You're going to
want a way to specify that xterm's get this pixmap, netscape gets that pixmap,
etc. You can either do this by duplicating the style command in the module, or
by extending the style command. But I don't know if we want to add fvwm styles
for everything that every decoration module wants. Perhaps we would just have
to have to classes of styles: builtin fvwm styles which are represented the
current way, and extra styles, which are just strings in a hash table. 

-- 
 Brady Montz
 [email-masked]