[Panel-devel] Plasma and the window manager (Re: KDE/kdebase/workspace/plasma/plasma)

[Lubos Lunak]

On Wednesday 21 of November 2007, Chani wrote:
> I think you guys know far more than me in this area :)
> this sounds like a terrible hack, tying the systray applet to plasma so
> tightly, but that doesn't mean it's the worst thing to do...
>
> things I'm wondering:
>
> what about other applets that need to have qwidgets? kickoff's got that
> menu, for one... are we likely to see more things wanting something like
> this (meaning we should figure out a general solution) or should we assume
> there's no other justification for such things - if it hasn't been done by
> now, it can wait until 4.1 - meaning we do this specially for the systray?
>
> when it comes to correctly positioning stuff, is it worth having a shortcut
> somewhere for an applet to find out where it really is? the systray has to
> loop through views to find the one it's on (with no guarantee that's the
> only one) which feels awkward to me.

 This is not limited to systray, the taskbar needs to know its real position 
on the screen too (KWin needs to be told this to properly do e.g. the 
minimize animation). There should be no problem with multiple taskbars here 
though, it should simply pick one.

> what about silly users who create multiple systrays? currently they end up
> with multiple ones, and harmless-seeming strangeness occurs, but is it
> possible to just have one global widget and share that between systray
> applets somehow?

 Systray icons are not even Plasma widgets, they are created and more or less 
fully handled by the application that created it. Meaning that e.g. mouse 
clicks wouldn't work with multiple systrays either, unless there would be 
some ugly event forwarding tricks.

 Having some nicer internal implementation of systray must be still somewhere 
in all my todo items :-/.

> what exactly is causing that darn black border?
>
> I think the systray may be setting some other unnecessary options, too. it
> seems like it's set to both keep-above *and* keep-below, by code in the
> widget and the applet...

 Those are presumably just hacks trying to get the toplevel widget right. 
Those flags should work only on toplevel widgets, so after the systray is 
moved inside the Plasma window they shouldn't matter at all.

-- 
Lubos Lunak
KDE developer
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