Re: Look & feel, future plans

[Tim Harrison]

Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:

> > Having more than one application open at the time clutters the screen, 
> > as the menu's overlaps eachother,
>
> Only if you don't have a properly working window-manager ... when one 
> application is
> active all the menus of other applications are hidden, so they never 
> block each other.

I don't think this is entirely accurate, from my point of view and 
experiences thus far.

I've used GNUstep on a few different window managers, and some 
applications, no matter the window manager, will continue to leave their 
menu in place, while another application's menu draws over top.  Maybe 
all the window managers I've used don't behave "properly" (which is a 
relative term -- what is the proper behaviour that you'd expect in this 
circumstance?), but the fact remains that it happens, and it's a pain in 
the gluteus.

If GNUstep plans to work with many different systems and window 
managers, I don't think saying "well, the window manager doesn't do it 
right" addresses the issue.  Maybe there's a way to forcefully message 
the menu when focus is changes, and demand that it disappear for the 
time being?  I'm definitely not a coder, so this is beyond my league.

The two applications that I've seen do this most often are Gorm and GNUMail.

One addendum:  I haven't updated my GNUstep installation since about a 
week prior to the switch to gnustep-back, so the issue may be resolved. 
 However, that would involve taking more time than I have at the moment 
to test.

--

Tim Harrison
tim@linuxstep.org
http://www.linuxstep.org/