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From: madd@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Jim Frost)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Proper way to set the root window's colormap?
Message-ID: <40210@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Date: 12 Oct 89 20:31:45 GMT
References: <40151@bu-cs.BU.EDU> <8910121410.AA19693@expire.lcs.mit.edu>
Reply-To: madd@cs.bu.edu (Jim Frost)
Followup-To: comp.windows.x
Organization: Software Tool & Die
Lines: 28

In article <8910121410.AA19693@expire.lcs.mit.edu> rws@EXPO.LCS.MIT.EDU (Bob Scheifler) writes:
In a previous artile, I write:
|    I need to know what the "proper" way to set the root window's colormap
|    and/or pixmap is.
|From this I think one should infer that the window manager owns the colormap;
|any mechanism for allowing clients to change it would at present be nonstandard.

Perhaps we should make a standard?  It's certainly pleasant to put a
picture on the background, particularly a color picture.  I've noticed
from playing with different window managers that setting the root
window colormap sometimes works, but it always works if you only
allocate colors in the default colormap.  Unfortunately there usually
aren't very many free colors on 8-bit displays (and none on 16).
While my particular application is pretty good at squashing colormaps
to fit, it often doesn't look nearly as nice as otherwise.
Intuitively I would guess that setting the default colormap would be
the "right" thing to do, but I'd be willing to bet that most window
managers wouldn't deal with that correctly.

|Changing the root window background is less problematic, but you may be
|fighting against a window/desktop manager's style guide in doing so.

Oh well :-).  Seriously, given how user-configurable X is, this kind
of thing ought to be taken as a given.

jim frost
software tool & die
madd@std.com