Subject: FVWM: drag'n drop

From: "Jacques B. Siboni" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 09 Jun 1999 17:39:14 +0000

Hi,

Do you know of a way to have access to a drag and drop feature with fvwm2?
I mean the feature found on Windows, and possibly on Motif, to grasp a file or
program and drop it onto the desktop ground?

Is it planned to be included in a future version or is there an additional
program that deals with it?

Cheers

Jacques

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From: Dominik Vogt <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Jun 1999 01:13:19 +0200

> program and drop it onto the desktop ground?

Drag-and-drop is way out of the responibilities of a window manager. Dtwm,
the window manager supplied for CDE doen't know about d&d either. It's the
'desktop environment' that provides the functionality. Fvwm knows nothing
about programs or files and thus could not know what to do with them.
Fvwm might be a *client* for d&d that can receive *objects* dropped into
it. In general, the d&d you will find on any UNIX isn't very sophisticated.
CDE has d&d, but it's limited to the few applications that are CDE aware
(i.e. the ones that are supplied with CDE and perhaps a few others). KDE
is said to get a very advanced d&d interface in the future (2.0 release).
I don't know about GNOME, but I suppose it's similar.

> program that deals with it?

No, there are no such plans. If someone wrote a module for this I'd be
willing to include it, but I don't believe anybody will do it before
it's clear how the future of d&d will look in the UNIX world (KDE? GNOME?
will KDE and GNOME agree on a common interface? Something completely
different?).

Bye

Dominik ^_^

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From: [email-masked] (Paul D. Smith)
Date: 10 Jun 1999 09:54:14 -0400

%% Dominik Vogt <[email-masked]> writes:

  dv> In general, the d&d you will find on any UNIX isn't very
  dv> sophisticated.  CDE has d&d, but it's limited to the few
  dv> applications that are CDE aware (i.e. the ones that are supplied
  dv> with CDE and perhaps a few others). KDE is said to get a very
  dv> advanced d&d interface in the future (2.0 release).  I don't know
  dv> about GNOME, but I suppose it's similar.

This is changing rapidly.  Version 4 of the XDND protocol has been
published and most of the major toolkits support it: Qt, GTK+ (1.2),
etc. support it so KDE and Gnome will, as do some other tools.  XEmacs
is going to support it in the 22.x versions.  StarOffice says they will
in 6.0.

So, it shouldn't be too long before you can drag and drop between all
these different apps--that's exciting.

  http://www.cco.caltech.edu/~jafl/xdnd/

They do list icewm and Window Maker as "window managers that use XDND",
but it's not entirely clear to me what that means.  I can see modules
like FvwmButtons and FvwmWinList making use of it, certainly.

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From: Dominik Vogt <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Jun 1999 16:08:49 -0600

> like FvwmButtons and FvwmWinList making use of it, certainly.

Perhaps the window manager is the client to receive d&d objects.
The action would be to place an icon on the desktop. But I can't
imagine what the window manager should do when a file is dropped
into it (i.e. what application it should start). In fvwm there
should be a module to handle d&d, I think.

Bye

Dominik ^_^

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From: Richard Lister <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Jun 1999 11:18:56 -0400

On Wed, 09 Jun 1999 17:39:14 +0000
"Jacques B. Siboni" <[email-masked]> 
> program that deals with it?

Hi Jacques

As others have already noted, drag and drop (dnd) falls outside the
remit of a window manager. However, it is currently available through
both the Gnome and KDE desktop environments. Gnome supports the Xdnd
and Motif protocols, and I believe KDE at least supports Xdnd,
possibly others (any KDE-heads out there with this info?).
You can read about Gnome dnd at http://www.gnome.org/white-papers/DND/DND/.

I believe Gnome should run on the major unices. If you're using
linux then RedHat 6.0 comes with both Gnome and KDE set up by
default. Most current linux distributions should have one or the
other or both.

At the moment I'm running fvwm2 and Gnome quite happily together,
and have dnd working even though fvwm isn't gnome-compliant yet.
I think someone is working on this in the current development
tree ... what's the current status of this, guys?

See
  http://www.gnome.org/
  http://www.kde.org/

Cheers
Ric

Richard J Lister, Georgetown Institute for Cognitive and Computational Sciences
Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington, DC 20007, USA
Phone: +1 202-687 2878
Email: [email-masked] 
Web: http://www.giccs.georgetown.edu/~ric/
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From: Richard Lister <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Jun 1999 11:23:02 -0400

On 10 Jun 1999 09:54:14 -0400
[email-masked] (Paul D. Smith) 
> like FvwmButtons and FvwmWinList making use of it, certainly.

I think with windowmaker it means you can have active apps in the 'dock'
(wm's buttons/toolbar), whereby dropping an object (file, url, text, etc)
on the app will trigger an appropriate action.

Ric

---

From: [email-masked] (Paul D. Smith)
Date: 10 Jun 1999 14:20:30 -0400

>> They do list icewm and Window Maker as "window managers that use
  >> XDND", but it's not entirely clear to me what that means.  I can
  >> see modules like FvwmButtons and FvwmWinList making use of it,
  >> certainly.

  rl> I think with windowmaker it means you can have active apps in the
  rl> 'dock' (wm's buttons/toolbar), whereby dropping an object (file,
  rl> url, text, etc) on the app will trigger an appropriate action.

Yep... and FVWM's equivalent to the dock is FvwmButtons, thus my comment
above :)

IOW, I can't think of anything the _core_ FVWM app would do with D&D,
but I can think of things that some of the _modules_ could do,
certainly.

I think it would be _'WAY_ cool if FvwmButtons supported D&D... I'd have
to look more closely at the protocol, though, to see how the FvwmButtons
configuration language would need to be extended to support it; I guess
you'd want to define new kinds of actions for the different types of
things that could be dropped on a button.