File dialog: preview widget

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Saturday 08 September 2007, Kleag wrote:
> Maybe this was already discussed on this list and it's here that I saw this
> idea. I don't remember.

to do this "properly" really requires a new set of window manager hints. 

personally there are a huge number of such "needed window manager hints" that 
i'm aware of to make X window managers suck a hell of a lot less, but i don't 
have the time or energy to get involved with that community to the needed 
level to get them in and i don't want to do a half-assed job of it (i think 
whoever does take these issues to the window manager community would only 
have one really good crack at it)

for the curious, such hints missing include:

- this window should be attached as a sheet to this other windowId
- this window should be side-atached to this other windowId (what you're 
looking for here =)
- system tray semantics (getting rid of the xembed widget, replacing it with a 
set of hints on a given window)
- panel semantics so that we can stop doing window management inside of 
desktop panels and instead treat each applet as a separate top level window 
and trying to coordinate between the window manager and the panel app(s). 
this would let us have any number of panel applications running at once (most 
notably removes the "can't use Foo applets in Bar desktop" problem along the 
way, while also allowing sane management of said panels geometries)

yeah, this is off topic, but it shows how much we're running into the 
limitations of window managers constantly right now. =/ maybe after 
composition managers are considered "complete enough" they will move on 
to "making them manage windows in a modern fashion" next =)

(this isn't a knock on our own wm team, btw, they have a shitload to do and 
are doing a good job of it; this is also a general problem among all window 
manager authors i know of.)

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Trolltech
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-core-devel/attachments/20070908/9caf7de1/attachment.sig>