simple XRANDR extension proposal

John Meacham john at repetae.net
Thu Jul 24 00:08:47 EEST 2003


I posted this to the xfree mailing list, but no actual development talk
seems to be going on there so I thought I would try here. perhaps
someone here knows where X11 developers go or is this it? (at least on
the client side)


I have a simple proposal which builds on the XRANDR extension.
Basically, my proposal is:

if XRANDR is present, then XReparentWindow behaves slightly
differently, if the new parent window is on a screen other than the one
the window is already on, then rather than generate a BadWindow error,
the window will be reparented succesfully and a RANDR event will be
generated and sent to the reparented window containing it's new root
window information. an implementation may require that a compatable
visual exist on the new screen. (which XReparentWindow requires on the
same screen anyway)

I think this would make working with multiple screens immensly more
useful and (with a properly extended window manager) would give 98% of
the value of XINERAMA without any of its issues.  It would also be
possible to use this behavior to allow turning on and off extra screens
at run-time. windows on the screen to be shut down can be reparented to
another.

        John

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John Meacham - California Institute of Technology, Alum. - john at foo.net
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