[rescue] The window mangler war

[Frank Van Damme]

On Saturday 08 February 2003 19:34, Joshua D. Boyd wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 08, 2003 at 01:38:53AM -0500, Michael Schiller wrote:
> > As I understand it (and I might be wrong) virtual desktops are desktops
> > that are larger than the displayed screen, and you can scroll the
> > screen around within the virtual desktop (say your display is set to
> > 1024x768, but your desktop is 1600x1200, your visible screen would be a
> > window to the whole desktop) multiple desktops are just having more
> > than one 'desktop', but the desktops are all the same size as your
> > displayable screen size.
>
> But then, isn't the virtual desktop a feature provided by the Xserver?

Yes and no. X has something like that - if you use a line like this in 
XF86Config-4 pe:

        Modes       "1024x768" "1280x1024" "800x600" "640x400"

the resolution will be 1024x768, but if you touch the screen edge, your 
"view" on the desktop will slide along (do I express myself clearly?). 
Press Ctrl-Alt-+/- and the resulution will become each one of the above, 
but desktop size will remain at the biggest one listed in the config file.

What Enlightenment offers is something TOTALLY different however.

First of all, it has a feature called multiple desktops, which is what most 
window managers call virtual desktops. "Click on another desktop in the 
pager and you'll see that one" is basically what it does.

Enlightenment devides each desktop (of the multiple desktops) in screens. A 
desktop can at maximum be 8x8 screens wide. The windows on it are in 
something like the same room, but you only see part of the floor. You can 
drag a window down till it leaves the screen, go down 1 screen on your 
desktop, and see a part of the virtual desktop where you see the window's 
bottom side. All in all, you can have 32 different desktops as in multiple 
desktops. 

Looking at the pager: you'll have a separate pager for each of the multiple 
desktops, and see its size in screens to screens. Also nice touches are the 
possibility of dragging windows across the desktop using the pager, or the 
feature to switch your view to the right/left/bottom/up touching that edge 
of the screen with your mouse cursor (it's configureable how long you have 
to hold it there before it switches), or the slide effect where you see the 
windows almost physically moving when sliding from view to view. 

So this, my friends, iw where Enlightenment spends its megabytes of memory 
:-)


-- 
Frank Van Damme
http://www.openstandaarden.be