Subject: FVWM: iconbox Icon placement - how to turn off "auto-pack"?

From: Benjamin Low <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 03 Sep 1998 14:30:06 +1000

(The following is with fvwm2 2.0.46)

Say I start a few xterms, and iconise them all. They automatically fill
the icon box I've defined, in the order I iconise them. But they don't
remember their places - it seems that fvwm2 will automatically "pack"
the icons into the box. What I want is for the icons to remember where
they started, and stay there when re-iconised (like olvwm).

It seems this is possible, as I noted fvwm2 will remember the icon's
placement if I physically position the icon where I want it - it always
returns to this position. (I don't want to have to specify an icon
position on the command line).

This is useful primarily for when I have a dozen editor windows open and
I can keep track of them by simply remembering where the icons stay.

Any ideas?

-- 
 Benjamin Low, BEng (Elec)
 Communications Unit, University of New South Wales, Australia
 (02) 9385 1138  [email-masked]  [email-masked]
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---

From: Benjamin Low <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 04 Sep 1998 11:33:54 +1000

Michael Tiefenback wrote:
... 
>  If you examine the code and determine which property is set by
> explicit icon placement and disables the autoplacement feature,
> you could change the code to do this by default after the first
> icon placement for

Yep, I found the bit that does the auto icon placement in icons.c,
function AutoPlace (now who on earth thought up the names for these
things :-). The code was explicitly examining only currently iconised
windows to see what space was available in the icon box area. It also
packed the icons such that the icons would end up moving around over
time. I changed this to look at all windows, iconised or not (removed
the test (test_windows->flags&ICONIFIED)). This allows any window which
has ever been iconified to "mark it's place", so to speak. I also added
a hack to set the ICON_MOVED flag on all icons in the iconbox, so that
they won't move from where they started, even if something's been moved
to overlap them. (This should also (insignificantly?) speed up
iconification).

The behaviour of this change with slippery icons is not ideal, (slippery
icons leave a hole in the other desks which won't be filled), but if you
use slippery icons it'd probably be best to stick them in a separate
icon box (?).