Re: sheets in GNUstep

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi,

Doug Simons wrote:
> I think you make a good point that resizing the window's content may 
> lead to problems. With a bit of finagling it should be possible to 
> keep the size of the contentView unchanged while resizing the window. 
> Even though that's a bit of extra work, my guess is it will work 
> better than trying to link two windows together. Given what I've seen 
> in the past (e.g. with drawers), linking windows doesn't really work 
> too well and is highly susceptible to platform-specific issues. 
> Implementing sheets as views would avoid all of that.

imagine you are running a standard window manager and have  it draw the 
window decoration (the most common setup).

I the case of a sheet being bigger, how would you imagine it looking? I 
fear it would look like crap, e.g with an over-sized title-bar and, 
depending on the window manger, decorations around the box containing both.

A non-square window? complicated.

I understand your concerns.

My first question is: how do we want sheets in GS?

Right now I have apps where I have two code tracks: one for mac, one 
where the sheets (and drawers) are just NSPanels.

Following this reasoning, we could have just Panels, however it is 
probably still difficult to have them act modal only to the right 
window, which is the real peculiarity of sheets. Linking the sheet to 
the window is only a visual clue and could be avoided.
I'd follow this path: if the windowmanager supports linking it will 
work: think about menus. If supported, these window would be title-bar 
less looking just quite fine.

Second instead we could try to implement them "Mac like", where however 
all the questions about linking and sizing remain.

Riccardo

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