Re: Plans for ahead

[Robert Slover]

On Nov 30, 2015, at 13:55, Matt Rice <ratmice@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Nov 30, 2015 at 9:42 AM, Robert Slover <rjslover@me.com> wrote:
>>> On Nov 30, 2015, at 04:37, Alessandro Sangiuliano <alex22_7@hotmail.com> 
>>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> I think I expressed bad my problem. The Menus appears when I click on the 
>>> relative App's window, so they are working as expected; but if I have 10 
>>> windows on the screen, organized to fill all the screen, as a tiled window 
>>> manager does, when I will click on an     App's window, the relative menu 
>>> have to appear somewhere, but the screen is filled so it will overlaps a 
>>> window of another App that I probably need to read, so I have to move the 
>>> menu to another position. This also would happen on a NeXTSTEP system, 
>>> because is how they designed the architecture of their DE. I'm sorry, but I 
>>> don't like at all this design, it's also something about tastes, but it is 
>>> also something about "functionality" if you also think about the Apps' icons
>> 
>> Alex,
>> 
>> I can only think that this would be a real problem on a small, single 
>> screen, but that may be the reality you have to deal with. On OpenStep at 
>> least, which I have ran at one point on a tiny (mid-1990s) laptop screen, 
>> you could position the menu basically off the edge of the screen (leaving 
>> just a few pixels sticking up from the bottom, is how I did it). You can 
>> then get at the app's menu as a context menu by right-clicking anywhere on 
>> the current app or desktop where there wasn't an interactive element (field, 
>> button, slider, etc.).
>> 
>> I'm not sure how well GNUstep emulates this currently, since all of my 
>> personal machines are headless.
> 
> I don't believe that it currently handles the last case, (right
> clicking on the desktop where there isn't an interactive element)...
> 
> due to a combination of 2 things:  most window managers e.g. window
> maker receive the right click and pop up a window, I wrote a wm once
> which would forward this event to the currently focused window to pop
> up a menu
> 
> the second part was getting GNUstep to not ignore this event.  IIRC I
> got it to pop up the menu, but ran into some difficulty with further
> tracking and never got it fully working.

I believe I remember reading something like that on this list quite a while 
back. This problem fits alongside the whole category of problems related to 
X11's different notions about focus, such as focus-follows-mouse mode, which 
even with a delay is problematic for GNUstep's NeXT-style menus.

--Robert