Position set/get prototype template

[Daniel Stone]

Hi Samuel,

On Mon, 8 Aug 2022 at 17:04, samuel ammonius <sfammonius at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 8, 2022 at 12:06 PM Simon Ser <contact at emersion.fr> wrote:
>> If you are not interested in explaining the use-cases, and are just
>> interested in blindly adding new features: sorry, but this isn't how we
>> want to approach things.
>
> Sorry for not giving a more specific answer to this earlier. The main reason is regarding an app's location when it starts up. For example, a large workspace application like VS-Studio or Blender may want to start maximized, but not full screen. AFAIK, Wayland has a protocol for fullscreen but not for maximizing/minimizing an app

Wayland does have a protocol for maximising apps. Without it, we
wouldn't have been able to ship as the default desktop for every
mainline distribution for several years now. I recommend you look into
the xdg-shell family of protocols. Introductory guides to Wayland will
also cover this.

> ... so this can only be done by setting the position to (0, 0) and setting the size to the viewport size of the compositor. Other apps may want to start where they left off. I know that this is something that the compositor should handle by default, but many of them don't. The largest obstacle is that apps like screenshot utilities may want to start in the top left, autoclickers start in the top right, console applications start in the center when opened with ALT+T, and many other small situations like. There are probably many other scenarios like this, and it seems like an unnecessary amount of pain to add a new protocol every time a new thing pops up.
>
> Anyways, I don't see the harm in adding this feature. Who says that a compositor is any smarter than an app? Many compositors don't support remembering a window's location, while many apps do. Apps aren't users, so taking power away from them isn't "making things simpler".

It's not taking any power away from apps. It's giving the entire
ecosystem more power. It takes more work to achieve than just blindly
taking the shortest possible path, but conversely it also saves us
from being painted into the same corners that made X11 no longer
viable.

Cheers,
Daniel