Wayland design principles (Re: wayland and gambas)

[Carsten Haitzler]

On Wed, 1 May 2024 09:35:30 +0200 (CEST) Jan Engelhardt <jengelh at inai.de> said:

> 
> On Tuesday 2024-04-30 07:23, Carsten Haitzler wrote:
> >> 
> >> Although gambas provides a Settings.Write(window_name) /
> >> Settings.Read(window_name) that saves/restores the window placement and
> >> size. It's bearable Wayland does not handle this.
> >
> >YOU should never be handling this. It's like saying "I'm used to having to
> >hand-crank my car's motor for it to start... why can't I keep doing that?".
> 
> In keeping with the car analogy: one *can* handcrank the motor, one just 
> needs a vehicle that implements *that*, so like youtu.be/4SZExEgLT_0 or, 
> indeed, running gambas on an X11 interface (xorg-server, Xnest, 
> Xwayland...)
> 
> >If all you do is the above, you've barely scratched the surface of
> >"remembering my window". Things you don't handle above:
> >
> >1. Stacking remembering (relative to other things you may know nothing about
> >like someoene else's windows)
> 
> I do not think anybody seriously uses overlaps, because searching
> in stacks (Alt-Tab or whatever method) is kinda inefficient. People
> either go big screen, workspaces/virtual desktops, or (say) temporarily
> exiting/suspending an editor to run the compiler.

In the case mentioned here these "desktop gadgets" once you resize/scale the
screen if you then scale the sizes/coords and deal with minimum surface sizes
you may end up with overlaps between multiple process gadget windows (Each
gadget is 1 window for 1 client/app) and the compositor can solve this by
guessing they are aligned in a row and "line the up again". Apps can't do this
- they don't know the other windows even exist.

This also can happen with regular windows. I actually often tile my windows by
hand (it's easy in E due to window resistance making it a doddle). If i e.g.
switched from 3840x1440 to a 2560x144 monitor - I'd not rescale but I'd have to
re-position and re-size as I had not adjusted scaling but adjusted screen
aspect ratio. Each terminal of the set of 15 I have is a different window and
process. Admittedly E doesn't quite realize it is a perfect grid. It's policy
on such screen resizes is to remember window positions based on nearest screen
anchor (top-left, top-middle, top-right, left-middle, center, right-middle,
bottom-left, bottom-middle, bottom-right). This handles going up in size
nicely. Down leaves some manual fiddling still but may lead to overlaps.
Something I probably can fix for sure. :)

-- 
------------- Codito, ergo sum - "I code, therefore I am" --------------
Carsten Haitzler - raster at rasterman.com