Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cis.ohio-state.edu!karl_kleinpaste From: karl_kleinpaste@cis.ohio-state.edu Newsgroups: comp.windows.x Subject: Re: Active icons for X11R4 xterm Message-ID: Date: 30 Sep 90 02:06:35 GMT References: Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu Reply-To: karl_kleinpaste@cis.ohio-state.edu, terri_watson@cis.ohio-state.edu Organization: Ohio State Computer Science Lines: 32 I posted changes to X11R4 xterm Friday, providing active icons. Since I've had three people write me mail asking what we were doing (in various terms :-), I thought I should explain a bit. X10R4 xterm 6.6B had active icons. You hit the title bar of the xterm and it would "iconify" by shifting to the nil2 font and parking itself in the icon location on the screen. X11 has made the issues of font selection and go-to-icon-location orthogonal. In fact, you _can't_ get them together. You can _either_ load a different font (e.g., nil2) and watch the xterm shrink in place, _or_ you can iconify it and have it disappear to the right place, but no longer be able to interact with it. But you can't have both. We think this is an error -- we find the ability to interact with a sometimes-small xterm _incredibly_ useful, and are unwilling to live without it. Hence, our active icon hack to X11R4 xterm -- it recreates the X10 behavior that we know and love. If you keep a pile of xterms on your screen most of the time (I normally have 13 xterms alive), the capability is very sorely missed when it's not present. We only converted X10->X11 a month ago, a matter forced on us due to conversion Sun3/50->SunSLC and no X10 support on Sparcs or under SunOS4.x. The primary hold-up factor in not having converted sooner was this particular behavior, not to mention the abysmal performance of X11 in discless 4Mb 3/50s. --karl (and terri) PS- Of course, now someone will show us X11 neophytes how we could have gotten what we wanted without all this pain...somehow it would figure. But the local X11 experts (both of 'em :-) had no clue how to get what we wanted without this hack.