Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!ATHENA.MIT.EDU!eichin From: eichin@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mark W. Eichin) Newsgroups: comp.windows.x Subject: re: X11 screen saver Message-ID: <8810211055.AA00440@OLIVER.MIT.EDU> Date: 21 Oct 88 10:55:50 GMT References: <3191@tekcrl.CRL.TEK.COM> Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 43 >>Date: 21 Oct 88 07:21:36 GMT >>From: tektronix!tekcrl!eirik@bloom-beacon.mit.edu (Eirik Fuller) >>In article <8810191538.AA12619@hplcyy.HPL.HP.COM> charles%hplcyy@HPLABS.HP.COM (Charles Young) writes: >>) Instead of the screen going blank when there are no input for a while, why >>) not change it so that it only goes blank when there are no "drawing" ... >>Please no; they made this mistake in X10. You evidently don't use a clock. The way I heard the story was that the Athena needed something to get rid of the screensaver, when we had VS100's running X10 that were used by students registering for accounts -- otherwise non-technical students would assume they were broken. So, Tony DellaFera (DEC employee @Athena) wrote an early version of xclock. >>I like the approach some mac screen savers take, in which there are >>two special rectangles, one for blank right away, another for blank >>never. For long output only programs, you'd just park the cursor in >>the magic spot that disables screen blanking. Other interfaces to >>this would be acceptable too, like menus perhaps. `xmoire' (posted to comp.sources.x by me) is such a MAC screen saver; it was a look-and-feel reconstruction, based on staring at the `moire' screen saver on our Mac 2 for far too long. It was a quick hack; as it turns out, I never use it. It has the upper-left corner `activate' square. A more popular alternative seems to be the screen-lock program we use here, which was posted a long time ago (it had been ported from X10) -- it has a little square which you click in to pop a `save/lock/exit' menu from. It then copies the background over the screen, and bounces the little square (with a timeclock and bitmap in it) around the screen. Any button- or key- press puts up a box with a password prompt. ------------ Keep in mind my proposal from a few months ago --- someone should write a `screensaver redirect/notify' extension, such that there would exist a portable way for a random client to know that the X server thought the user was idle. As this discussion aptly proves, if you don't let the customer choose the behavior, the customer will flame. Mark Eichin SIPB Member & Project Athena ``Watchmaker''