Adding a margin around the desktop containment

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Wednesday 01 April 2009, Thomas Schildknecht wrote:
> I'm not very familiar with the internals of Plasma, so before I start
> digging into the code, can someone tell me if this is feasible with a
> desktop containment (for example, cloning the default desktop and adding
> this feature) ?

absolutely; it should be very trivial in fact; you could also use the layout 
code from DefaultDesktop to get some nice widget layout management.

as others have already pointed out, the containment will just need to register 
some struts with the window system. 

now the question is user control: 

* would it be an equal border all the way around the desktop? (easy to 
configure in that case: a simple int for the height/width of the margin)

* would it be customizable on all four edges? (that would be quite cool, 
actually; maybe you could make border markers on the desktop that are 
draggable? you could show them only when the toolbox is open, even)

one limitation on multiscreen systems, however: window managers tend not to 't 
know what to do with reserved struts that lie between two screens. so if you 
have a left-right screen layout and you set a strut on the right edge of the 
left screen, it doesn't work out so well. this is a flaw in the extended strut 
design as it assumes a big rectangle; kwin works around this with some 
internal cleverness, but you may still run into some little problems with 
multiscreen systems. *shrug*

can't wait to see your containment in svn :)

-- 
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 Qt Software

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