Resizing child windows

[Glynn Clements]

Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) wrote:

> > 	Needless to say, but apart from reducing flickering, an
> > 	application with windowless child widgets is much more
> > 	light-weight and resource friendly as we don-F-F’t allocate native-A-A
> > 	windows for every single widget.
> > 
> > It's only "resource friendly" if you ignore the overhead of processing
> > (as well as transmitting) all of those MotionNotify events.
> 
> that overhead is really nothing to worry about. for every time u need to
> reconfigure

How often is that? It's a lot less frequent than motion events.

> u need to not just draw but also move/resize a bunch of windows

Most child widgets don't need to be reconfigured if the parent is
reconfigured (unless you're dividing the space equally between the
children, which is usually bad for aesthetic reasons as well as for
efficiency).

> and also handle their stacking when you have them overlap?

How common are overlapping widgets?

> for that matter
> non-rectangular event regions - see how wonderfully efficient x gets with
> window shapes having to be generated and set/reset from client to server side,
> instead of simply handling it with much more efficiency client-side.

How common are non-rectangular widgets? Beyond that, how common are
non-rectangular widgets which are non-rectangular for reasons which
aren't purely cosmetic?

> once you
> get sufficiently exotic - x's event stream breaks down and you DIY. since the
> cost difference is really negligible (these days) you go for just 1 model for
> simplicity. they are doing the right thing by their design and needs. zack
> isn't dumb by any stretch of the imagination and he knows his way around x.

It isn't the right thing by my needs. But then I do actually rely upon
network transparency quite heavily (my main X terminal is my WindowsXP
box; that *needs* a monitor, so it may as well be the one which gets
it, and thus acts as X terminal for everything else).

But then I guess it depends upon whether you're interested in form or
function. If someone thinks that non-rectangular, translucent widgets
and animated cursors are worth spending resources on, then they're
probably going to decide things rather differently to how I would.

-- 
Glynn Clements <glynn at gclements.plus.com>