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From: adamj@web5h.berkeley.edu (Adam J. Richter)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Multiple screens and multiple visuals
Message-ID: <13562@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 23 Aug 88 10:47:33 GMT
Sender: usenet@agate.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 38
References:


	Recently, somebody (was it RWS?) posted a note saying that it
would be nice X servers will treat multiple screens as a single screen
with multiple visuals.

	Don't do it.  Future applications may want to use different
visuals for different sub-windows, and must not be mislead into
believing that two visuals coexist on the same screen, when in fact
those visuals span physically disjoint screens.  For example, consider
a color animation program that manipulates the color map to do
animation in one window, while displaying monochrome text in another
window.

	Don't do it.  The whole point of being able to put the screen
number in your DISPLAY environment variable is so that you can
specify the screen on which YOU want the application to appear.  I
have routinely used multi-headed X11 servers, and I routinely
intentionally put applications on the "wrong" monitor because the
other one is cluttered, or for some other reasonable reason.  I want
that level of control.

	Don't do it.  The functionality of selecting the best visual
or screen belongs on the client side, either as an *OPTION* in Xlib or
in the toolkit.  E.g., it might be reasonable if a toolkit would try
to make an intelligent choice if $DISPLAY was of the format:

		"unix:0"

	but, would always be forced to display #5, if DISPLAY were:

		"unix:0.5"

	That's one way to do it.  Don't touch the X server; your time
would be much better spent responding to bug reports, distributing
patches and releasing new distributions more frequently.

Adam J. Richter			adamj@zen.berkeley.edu
2600 Ridge Road			....!ucbvax!zen!adamj
Berkeley, CA 94709		Home: (415)549-6379