[HN Gopher] Accidentally making windows vanish in my old-fashion...
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       Accidentally making windows vanish in my old-fashioned Unix X
       environment
        
       Author : raid2000
       Score  : 43 points
       Date   : 2024-02-09 10:13 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (utcc.utoronto.ca)
 (TXT) w3m dump (utcc.utoronto.ca)
        
       | pmontra wrote:
       | I also used those windows managers around 1990, iconify to
       | desktop and no task bar. I use a heavily customized GNOME 3
       | desktop now, with an autohiding task bar that appears when I move
       | the pointer to the bottom edge. My desktop is an empty solid
       | color image that sometimes appears between windows. I don't keep
       | anything there, even when it was still possible by default. Too
       | much clicking but I don't like that defaults get more and more
       | opinionated. Let people do whatever they want.
        
       | chrsw wrote:
       | "old-fashioned"... oof
        
       | dsr_ wrote:
       | I did this to myself 15 or 20 years ago, and ever since have put
       | a collection area for iconified windows on a panel.
       | 
       | In XFCE, it's easy to create a completely transparent panel
       | running Window Buttons with "show minimized windows only" ticked,
       | which emulates putting the icons on the desktop but corrals them
       | to always show up in one location. Typically, if I have more than
       | one minimized window, I've made a mistake -- but that's what the
       | corral is for, saving me from mistakes.
        
       | jmclnx wrote:
       | I like this quirkiness of X window managers also. Some (like
       | fvwm) will do exactly what you tell it to do, no more, no less.
       | 
       | Sad to see these type quirks will go away when Linux moves
       | completely to Wayland.
        
         | raid2000 wrote:
         | Yes. Some of them are are only a couple thousand lines of
         | code[1]. No background "activities", no keyboard shortcut
         | stealing from other apps.
         | 
         | 1: https://git.suckless.org/dwm/files.html
        
           | ratmice wrote:
           | XGrabKey?
        
         | TacticalCoder wrote:
         | > Sad to see these type quirks will go away when Linux moves
         | completely to Wayland.
         | 
         | I started using Linux when I was 25 or so. I'm 51 now. I do
         | believe there's a far from zero probability that X is going to
         | outlast me... Even if I live until 80!
         | 
         | P.S: and the day X dies, in decades, I do also think it's
         | possible that, at long last, Wayland shall be as customizable
         | and allows to do all the amazing thing X allows to do.
        
           | bornfreddy wrote:
           | Unfortunately, I don't share your optimism. Judging by the
           | fiasco that systemd is and how it managed to completely win
           | over init scripts, even the opensource world is not immune to
           | fashion / politics / ...
        
             | xyzzy_plugh wrote:
             | I miss writing sysvinit scripts exactly _never_.
             | 
             | Even if you were building a system for which init stages
             | would be immutable, forever sealed and unchanging,
             | determining the correct ordering means understanding every
             | daemon and all their associated quirks and their
             | dependencies and the quirks associated with their
             | dependencies and so on...
             | 
             | I will never get the hours spent being a human SAT solver
             | trying to safely order hundreds of lexicographically
             | ordered start and stop scripts that may or may not be
             | present in an unbelievable number of permutations.
             | 
             | The reason sysvinit is extinct is neither fashion or
             | politics, but evolution.
        
               | throwanem wrote:
               | Given my experience writing systemd units and then trying
               | to figure out why they don't behave as the documentation
               | says that they should, this suggests that being miserable
               | to work with must be an adaptively neutral trait in init
               | systems, thus selected neither for nor against.
        
             | toast0 wrote:
             | Systemd has taken over most popular Linux distributions,
             | but Linux isn't the whole of the opensource world.
             | 
             | I suspect X servers will die out at some point, but you
             | could probably just run XWayland right? I've not messed
             | with Wayland yet, because it doesn't address my use cases
             | (mythtv frontends which is one X program with no window
             | manager, and running programs on freebsd/linux for display
             | on Windows).
        
       | numpad0 wrote:
       | On Windows, there is "Move" menu item in shift+right click
       | context menu on taskbar icons. Selecting this item, then pressing
       | left/right/up/down key brings window immediately into closer edge
       | of valid desktop area, with mouse pointer sent to that window
       | titlebar. This item existed since at least OS/2, and although it
       | was not found in early version of Windows 11 new taskbar, it has
       | since been re-implemented.
       | 
       | I know because I needed it while it had been missing :p
        
         | kjellsbells wrote:
         | I believe that is only available for native Windows apps. Alt-
         | Space was the keyboatd shortcut for it, very useful if the
         | window had moved so far offscreen that you could not reach it
         | with the mouse.
         | 
         | However, this doesn't seem to work with the newer Electron
         | style apps, like Teams. They do not appear to follow the
         | classic Windows patterns.
        
           | xeromal wrote:
           | Yeah, there's some delineation in those apps. I notice the
           | same behavior when I hover over the "maximize window" icon in
           | Windows 11 and some apps show an outline of the options of I
           | have but electron apps including chrome
        
             | mmis1000 wrote:
             | At lease for the function that trigger by hoving maximun
             | button. I believe windows do expose this api, firefox has
             | this enabled for years even they draw the whole screen
             | include icons using xul. And electron apps in native resize
             | button mode also use actual windows resize button (Or fake
             | one created by electron itself?) that has this function
             | enabled. It's just some million-dollor company that are too
             | dumb to support it properly (Or probably PM pushed it back
             | because no user requires it?)
        
       | pluc wrote:
       | Never understood the point of "a desktop" because of this. Why
       | bother to have programs you only use on-demand just sitting
       | there? The same thing, that I find more useful, can be achieved
       | by actually running the programs you need (through a run menu)
       | and just having them exist. Windows are my desktop icons, I don't
       | need what I don't use.
       | 
       | (I use fluxbox with rofi)
        
         | dsr_ wrote:
         | There's more than one preference on how to do things.
        
       | pk-protect-ai wrote:
       | That's a dedication ... eating glass for 35 years or so ... I'm
       | not better though, over decades I've stuck with GNOME 2 (MATE
       | desktop atm) ... This made me think right now, what exactly do I
       | want from a desktop environment, and why am I satisfied with
       | GNOME 2? I need to make a list of it and really think about it.
        
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