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From: rees@pisa.ifs.umich.edu (Jim Rees)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Re: DM from a shell
Keywords: Dm, xdmc, wc
Message-ID: <1990Sep5.111201@pisa.ifs.umich.edu>
Date: 5 Sep 90 15:20:38 GMT
References: <25406.26e391cb@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> <600@eba.eb.ele.tue.nl>
Sender: usenet@terminator.cc.umich.edu (usenet news)
Reply-To: rees@citi.umich.edu (Jim Rees)
Organization: University of Michigan IFS Project
Lines: 27

In article <600@eba.eb.ele.tue.nl>, wjw@eba.eb.ele.tue.nl (Willem Jan Withagen) writes:
   The other question also bugs me: One can set a range of window size to create.
   But on a regular basis does the DM decide that it'll make a different size.
   prefably of the size which was last recently used. 
   I do not want this, how do we get ride of this ?

If you give window dimensions, the DM should always honor them.  If you
don't, the DM will use the dimensions of the last window you closed, unless
it has already created a window using those dimensions.  Otherwise, the DM
will cycle through your "window defaults," which you set with the 'wdf'
command.  You can have as many window defaults as you like, up to some
maximum (10 or so?).

If you want to get a somewhat more rational (in my opinion) behavior than
just cycling through your window defaults, use the undocumented 'wdf -a' DM
command in your startup_login.  This will change the behavior so that the DM
will count up how many windows are using each window default, and try to
create the new window in the least busy place (using the default with the
least number of windows already there).  This eliminates the annoying case
where you have one window on the screen and the DM decides to put your next
window exactly on top of it.

All this goes out the window (so to speak) if the DM isn't your window
manager.  The DM will still try to adhere to the above behavior, but will
fail miserably because your window manager will move each window down after
creation to make room for decorations at the top.  This results in your
windows slowly creeping off the bottom of your screen.  Most annoying.