Re: [Qemu-devel] Controlling SDL2 output with Ctrl+Alt+*

[Peter Maydell]

On 22 April 2014 09:44, Kevin Wolf <address@hidden> wrote:
> Am 22.04.2014 um 10:14 hat Gerd Hoffmann geschrieben:
>> On (a): I personally almost never use the qemu terminals.  When running
>> qemu directly I usually use "-monitor stdio" or "-serial stdio" instead,
>> so chardev goes to my normal xterm, which works better than the qemu
>> terminal emulation.  When using qemu via libvirt it's moot anyway.  So,
>> is there a strong need for it in the first place?
>
> To be more specific, when running qemu directly I use "-monitor stdio"
> _xor_ "-serial stdio", so one of them still has to use the qemu
> terminal. Usually I have the serial console on stdio and use
> Ctrl-Alt-[12] to switch between guest and monitor. Making the monitor
> inaccessible without a more complicated configuration involving sockets
> or something would be rather annoying.

Agreed. I think it's also worthwhile that the no-options out-of-the-box
setup gives access to all of serial/monitor/graphics (preferably in a
reasonably discoverable way, ie with tabs or menus).

>> On (b): Swapping window content becomes pretty messy with multihead
>> support.  And as SDL2 has support for multiple windows anyway I think it
>> would be easier to just create a new window per vc.  Ctrl-Alt-123
>> hotkeys could simply show/hide the windows.
>>
>> Comments?
>
> As long as you make sure the windows stay in the same place and
> switching wouldn't make "the window" jump around,

Window placement is the job of the window manager, so the
application can't guarantee anything like this. If you want it to
look like "one window whose contents change" then you should
implement it that way. Conversely, if we think multiple windows is
a better UI we should implement that for all the UI backends that
we can support it on. I'm not convinced we should implement
SDL2's UI differently from all the rest just because it seems easier.

thanks
-- PMM