OSD and Notification Window Type

[Martin Gräßlin]

On Monday 24 November 2014 19:55:21 Kai Uwe Broulik wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> owing to Eike's request I have investigated how to improve fullscreen
> handling in notifications, queuing them while in fullscreen. While doing so
> I found a few usability quirks:
> 
> First of all, the OSD uses the Notification WindowType, which - I think
> there has been a bit of a miscommunication - is meant for notifications.
> The OSD stays on top of everything, which is fine, but not the active
> fullscreen window. I thus propose to have a window type/layer for the OSD
> that stays on top of everything since I want to have volume feedback even
> when watching a movie.

+1 to that

> 
> Furthermore, I've been using the notification applet with the Notification
> window type and it was no pleasant experience. The popups were always in the
> way, systray and other popups, even tooltips(!) were covered by the
> notification popup. At the moment you can bring popups above notifications
> by focussing the popup which is nice but there's an issue where clicking a
> notification causes the popup to close, which eats focus [1].

tooltips should not be managed windows, but override redirect. From EWMH spec: 
"This property is typically used on override-redirect windows." - If Plasma is 
not using override redirect windows for tooltips this is a bug that should be 
fixed. An override redirect window is always on top of any window managed by 
KWin (e.g. the notifications).

Concerning other popups and the systray popups this need to be thought about 
what we want to achieve. Concerning the systray popup I think we rather found 
a weak spot in our setup: systray popup and notification using the same area 
on the screen might not be the best solution. Anyway also this is fixable by 
looking at the window types and then redefining where the notifications should 
go. IMHO the layer is currently correct. A notification should be on top of 
other windows, we don't want to have it shown e.g. behind the panel.

> 
> As far as I can see, it has been agreed upon that notifications should never
> go ontop of an active fullscreen window (you don't want a "Hey, darling"
> notification pop up during a presentation) but otherwise on top.

yes, exactly.

Cheers
Martin
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