Plasma and KWin Integration

[Marco Martin]

On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 4:21 AM, Lucas Murray <lmurray at undefinedfire.com> wrote:

>>
>> At the moment the shadows of shaped windows don't really work, could we have
>> something like a separate shadow mask?
>
> The problem with this one is that we have yet to work out an algorithm
> that can expand a window mask (KWin already knows the shape of the
> window so there is no need to send a separate shadow mask) that can
> run faster than 15fps. If you guys can write something that works
> without bringing the desktop to a crawl please let us know as it will
> close a very old bug [1] that we've been trying to solve all this
> time.

i know that making shadows for alpha channels to windows is not really
possible now, but i would really love to see the clipping mask not
used at all when composite is on, would kill quite a bit of overhead

> [1] http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=157353
>
>> 6. Marco created a patch that added a shadow to the plasma panel, and whilst
>> kwin handled the strut correctly in some cases, it did not in others. For
>> example, the magnetic window borders stuck to the shadow rather than to the
>> edge of the panel.
>
> Is there any reason why we are not using KWin shadows for the panel?
> If you must absolutely not use KWin shadows then having window
> snapping ignore dock windows if the window sets a strut is no hard
> task.

i'm still nore really shure about that patch but if it goes in it
could be used to do stuff also pretty different from shadows (like an
osx style zooming dock, just as an example, even if i don't like it)
aaanyways, beside that there are two tricky parts of panel shadows:
rounded borders, so same issue as generic shaped windows shadows
and sliding panels aren't actually moving windows, it's just the
content of the window moving, so kwin doesn't know a sliding is
happening

>> 7. Theming of kwin dialogs to match the rest of the desktop furniture.
>>
>> Things like the window menu are part of the desktop rather than part of
>> applications and it would be great if they were coloured like the other pieces
>> of furniture rather than like the applications they manage. The same thing
>> applies to a number of other things drawn by kwin such as in the box switch
>> effect.
>
> I agree with having the theme in desktop effects but I'm not too sure
> by what you mean by the "window menu". You mean the Alt+F3 one? I
> don't really see how using Plasma there will benefit anything.

was thinking more about already custom drawn windows, like the alt+tab
box switching plugin

>> 8. Document modal windows.
>>
>> Having a way to handle document-modal windows along the lines of the Sheets in
>> MacOS. These would be positioned over their parent window and move with the
>> parent.
>
> If there is a detach button and doesn't interfere with resizing of the
> sheet I have no problem with this feature. I extremely regularly move
> file open/save dialogs around to see what's in the parent and resize
> them so I can more quickly get to the file I want.
>
>> 9. Hide the panel when zooming out to show the containments.
>>
>> As discussed already by Sebas, and patch provided.
>
> Assuming you mean "desktop" instead of "containment" then "no" for the
> reasons that we have already discussed.
>
>> 10. Alt-Tab to desktop and panel
>>
>> The desktop and panel need to be able to get the keyboard focus to allow users
>> without keyboards to activate and use them.
>
> I like it. How can KWin detect if Plasma is running (So KWin can run
> without Plasma) and trigger the dashboard when selected? For things
> like box switch and the like we will also need a thumbnail of the
> dashboard. As X doesn't create thumbnails of non-existent or unmapped
> windows the dashboard will need to always be mapped and placed behind
> the desktop window. Doing this will also solve the white screen issue
> when the dashboard is shown.
> _______________________________________________
> Plasma-devel mailing list
> Plasma-devel at kde.org
> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/plasma-devel
>