Subject: FVWM: 2.0.46, FvwmTaskBar

From: Bruce Stephens <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Aug 1997 11:46:22 +0100

Potentially nice module, but it doesn't seem quite ready for serious use yet 
(in fvwm2 anyway; works fine in fvwm95 at home).  With the patches recently 
posted, it works a bit better, but still seems to soak up cpu time.  I suspect 
it's going into a busy wait somewhere.  "Close"ing it also doesn't cause it to 
die, which is incorrect behaviour: the window disappears, but the process 
continues, taking up 80% or so of cpu time.

Something like this would be nice.  In particular, its ability to hide itself 
and reappear when the pointer goes near is a nice way of conserving screen 
space.  I want something like an icon box which should be easily available, 
but don't want to have a real iconman with StaysOnTop or something; 
FvwmTaskBar promises to be just the thing, once it's fixed to work with fvwm2. 
 Don't care about the Start menu---that seems utterly superfluous.  Perhaps 
the same thing would be good for FvwmButtons?

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From: [email-masked] (Stephen Riehm)
Date: Tue, 26 Aug 1997 14:24:52 +0200 (MEZ)

Hi Bruce,

> In particular, its ability to hide itself and reappear when the
> pointer goes near is a nice way of conserving screen space.  I want
> something like an icon box which should be easily available

This is the only "good" idea to come from Win95 (IMHO) :-) - I've also
tried to create an application which shrinks itself when the focus
leaves the window, and pops itself up automatically as soon as the
focus enters the mini-window, however with fvwm2 it doesn't work (and
there's a few good, but "technical" technical reasons :-( ).

Of course this would also be possible if the mouse events could be
extended, so that not just things like button events, but also enter
and leave events could be mapped. Then you could have something like:

Mouse	Enter	I	A	Deiconify
Mouse	Leave	F	A	Iconify

all that's missing then is to be able to bind this functionality to a
specific application.

The "technical" difficulty that I spoke of above is simply that if you
try to move or resize a window, during the move or resize operation,
the focus is taken away from the app, and the app gets a focus event
(actually it gets 4!). Also, for some reason the geometry returned by
fvwm is not exactly the same as the geometry given by the application,
so having the application know where it is tends to go a little awry,
for me, the window wanders to the top left of the screen.

The other difficulty was that I didn't actually want to iconify the
window, rather, show a minimizes version of the window, with some key
information. Some uses for this sort of thing that come to mind would
be:
	A mail program, which when minimised shows subjects of a few
	of the newest waiting e-mails. Move the focus (with the
	keyboard or mouse) onto this mini window, and your full blown
	mailer pops up.

	A task tracking program (similar to xtimex) where the current
	activity and time would be shown in the mini window, and the
	full selection of activities when it gets the focus.

	A simple clock, in the mini form you see the time and date,
	in the full size form, you get a scheduler, alarm clock etc.

There are tons of ways in which this idea can be put to good use,
there are just a few things which need to be worked out:

	- how to "SIMPLY" adjust the size and position of the full
	  sized window, and the same for the mini-window (at least as
	  far as positioning goes)

	- how to combine this idea with the ButtonBar (mini window in
	  the button bar, full size window somewhere on the screen)

Perhaps this could be solved with a library (libminimizer?), at the
moment I don't know if X11 needs some slightly different events
(InMotion, Resizing?) or if the way the window manager communicates
with the windows needs to be cleared up a bit, it could also be that
something like this already exists, and I'm just showing my ignorance,
but I am yet to see ANY application which does this sort of thing.

By the way, the mini-windows here are NOT to be confused with icons,
icons are little more than a button saying: "I am an application,
click on me to see what I am", a mini window is a proper application
window, displaying information, but not accepting it (when focus
enters the mini window, the full size window for the application pop's
up, taking the focus with it).

I would be most glad to hear ideas and suggestions about this sort of
thing, and would dearly love to see a working example, maybe you guys
are the ones to pull it off?

PS: this has NOTHING to do with my employer, all comments, brilliant
ideas and errors in this e-mail are mine and mine alone, except of
course the idea of a self hiding application which I gladly borrowed
from M$ (and they've never stolen ideas either - nooooooo ;-)

Steve
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From: Bruce Stephens <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Aug 1997 16:12:49 +0100

[email-masked] said:
> By my side, FvwmTaskBar uses ... 0% of the processor almost all the 
> time and takes only 0,97% of the memory (48M). In face I use a 
> heavily modified version, which I submitted to Chuck, but I don't 
> think that this the modifications concerned any optimisation. 

Yes, I take back my comment.  It *was* using a high proportion of time, but when I just restarted it, it seems to work OK.  Don't know what's going on, but I suspect some intermittent bug.