[4974] in Athena Bugs
X11R4: geometry specs and window manager borders
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ken Raeburn)
Wed May 23 09:24:07 1990
Date: Wed, 23 May 90 09:23:55 EDT
From: Ken Raeburn <Raeburn@MIT.Edu>
To: bugs@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
The current mechanism for dealing with geometry specs interacts poorly
with the borders put up by window managers. When I supply a geometry spec
of "+0-0", I mean "at the lower left corner", not "at the lower left
corner, plus whatever offsets to the left and _down_ that the window
manager provides".
The lower-left corner represents a good example (and upper-right is
probably good too). Putting borders on windows results in a horizontal
push towards the center, and a vertical push off the screen. The user
shouldn't have to adjust all his geometry resources to account for a
change in window managers.
And there's no way (that I'm aware of) to find out what the border size
will be, and take it into account, in a program -- and certainly no way to
do it in resources, which aren't even flexible enough to describe "center"
or "width of screen minus 20".
I'm sure these aren't going to be fixed any time soon, if ever; I just
wanted to point them out as annoying minor flaws in the design. Perhaps
someday clients will be able to communicate more intelligent geometry
descriptions to window managers?
