wayland menu

[Pekka Paalanen]

On Tue, 11 Dec 2018 21:12:29 +0100
David Craven <david at craven.ch> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> This isn't a concrete proposal but I think it would be nice to have
> support for compositors implementing a menu like interface that
> wayland clients can use. What this menu is or how it is implemented is
> up to the compositor. The client would register an action in a tree
> like structure and be notified when it occurs. This would allow
> implementing for example a mac osx style compositor where the main
> application menu is rendered outside of the window and changes
> depending on what window has focus, or provide a more vim like
> multimode experience with unified keybindings. I think this would help
> toolkits like qt provide a native look and feel on wayland and
> compositors define what a native look and feel is.

Hi,

I think the KDE developers have looked into something like that, and
maybe others.

However, the comment about look and feel is upside-down. By default,
unless both the compositor and the client mutually agree otherwise, it
will be the client who draws the window decorations as part of its
window, so the client defines the look and feel. Letting something to
be drawn by the compositor only requires the compositor to draw
something with its own look and feel, and it is left for the OS as a
whole to agree on how to get a unified look and feel.

A counter-proposal would be a protocol extension where the compositor
tells the client that the user wants to open a window menu somewhere,
please set up a wl_surface and register it with this request. That
would put the look and feel where the rest of the look and feel is: the
client. The compositor would then place that menu wl_surface where it
belongs.

A different topic around the same theme is window manager actions in a
window menu. The actions come from the compositor, but the menu is
drawn by the client.

All this turns upside-down again, when you factor in the Wayland
extension that allows the compositor to decorate windows.

I hope people from the DE projects will chime in, this is a complicated
topic.


Thanks,
pq
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