Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!ogicse!unmvax!uokmax!servalan!rmtodd From: rmtodd@servalan.uucp (Richard Todd) Newsgroups: comp.windows.x Subject: Re: virtual roots Summary: keepa you hands offa my virtual roots :-) Message-ID: <1990Dec12.051615.3583@servalan.uucp> Date: 12 Dec 90 05:16:15 GMT References: <1990Dec12.005016.4802@smsc.sony.com> Organization: Ministry of Silly Walks Lines: 44 dce@smsc.sony.com (David Elliott) writes: >One big question is whether or not the virtual root model is >the right way to go. Specifically, are the things you use the >virtual root for adequately or better taken care of by a rooms >implementation builtin to a window manager? (In my case, having >the ability to iconify/deiconify all windows in a given icon >manager could do most of the work I use tvtwm for.) The main thing I find the virtual root useful for is making useful all those X programs written by people who assume everyone has a 1000x1000 monitor on their computer (the "All the world's a Sun" syndrome). GhostScript or similar programs become a lot more useful when you can actually pan around and see all of the window :-). For those of us with small monitors, virtual root window managers like tvtwm are a major convenience, and provide functionality (allowing ready use of windows bigger than the physical monitor) that, as I understand it, isn't addressed at all by the "rooms" programs. I do occasionally use the virtual desktop to provide rooms-like functionality, but it's definitely a side issue--it's not the big thing that inspired me to pull tvtwm off the net and install it here, it's the ability to not have to buy a megapixel display just to run GhostScript. (I'm not deliberately slagging on GhostScript here; it's hardly the only program with large-window-syndrome, just one I happen to use a lot.) In short, there is one thing (emulating a bigger display) that the virtual root scheme does, that isn't done *at all* by a "rooms"-type WM. So, as John Cleese said in the petshop, "It's scarcely a replacement then, is it?" As an aside, one of the things I find interesting about X is that it was possible to implement such a thing as a virtual root window manager purely in user-level client code, without having to do any strange hacking to Xlib or the X server. While there do exist "expanded desktop" programs for other systems (Stepping Out for the Macintosh being perhaps the most widely known example), such programs generally can't be implemented on those systems without all sorts of exceedingly messy patching of low-level internals of the window system. On X it falls out as a natural usage of the existing calls to re-arrange window structure. Says something about the level of generality in the Xlib interface, I think. -- Richard Todd rmtodd@uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu rmtodd@chinet.chi.il.us rmtodd@servalan.uucp "Try looking in the Yellow Pages under 'Psychotics'." -- Michael Santana