Top-most windows

[Deron Johnson]

Keith and I have been discussing the creation of a new concept called
a "topmost" window. This would be a window which would always live on
top of all windows (except the screen saver). It leverages most of
the screen saver changes that have already been made to dix/window.c.
I would use this to render the LG 3D graphics and Keith would use
this for his magnifier.

In this mail, Keith proposes the concept.

Keith Packard wrote On 01/04/06 16:57,:
> On Wed, 2006-01-04 at 15:15 -0800, Deron Johnson wrote:
> 
>>LG provides it's own window manager. Currently this wm doesn't interfere
>>in Configure and Circulate requests at all--I'll need to upgrade it to
>>do this. Is there anything else I need to do beside handling the events
>>ConfigureRequest and CirculateRequest?
> 
> 
> Oh. Wait. This won't work -- there are still menus (and any other
> override-redirect windows) which are going to get in the way here.
> 
> We either need a way to create a 'always on top' window, or some other
> way to avoid having this window ever be clipped by its siblings. Hmm.
> Always on top is actually fairly easy to do; DIX already supports the
> screen saver window which does precisely this. Hacking this to support
> an additional always-on-top application window might be possible. The
> alternative is to hack Composite so that it computes alternate clip
> lists for non-clip-by-siblings windows; it's already got hooks in the
> right places for this, so that might actually be fairly easy.
> 
> -keith
>