Best practices for saving and restoring window layout

[Brad Robinson]

Hi All,

First post here...

I'm looking into porting an existing UI library to Gtk+ and I'm struggling
to solve a couple of problems related to window positioning when using
Wayland as the backend.

I've read through the posts on this list's archive about window positioning
and it's clear that a global coordinate system isn't something that Wayland
supports - fair enough and I understand the reasons why.

However, I'm wondering what the recommendations are for applications with
complicated user-controllable layouts that need to be persisted not only
across application runs, but also between documents and across application
modes.

For example:

* my application is a music app where the user might have many plugin
windows carefully positioned across multiple monitors.
* each document file has a different set of plugins loaded and those plugin
windows need to be restored to their previous location.
* the app can be in "Live" mode or "Edit" mode and switching between modes
saves and restores the plugin window locations for each mode.

How should such an app be handled under Wayland?

Note: the app doesn't need to be able to explicitly position windows. It
just needs a way to capture and restore a window's position.  An opaque
string or data structure that the app can save and use to later reposition
a window back to that same place would be perfect.  It would need to be
client persistable though - eg: giving a window an id that the window
manager can use to store previous geometry probably wouldn't suffice.

I'm about to refactor a big part of the code that handles this and now is
the time I can make conceptual changes that could better cater for Wayland
as a back end. I've seen comments in the archive about how a global
coordinate system isn't necessary and that issues related to a lack of one
can be better solved by other means but I'm not sure what those other means
are and I'm struggling to see a way forward with this.

Any thoughts, suggestions, recommendations greatly appreciated.

Brad
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