Re: [XForms] application positioning

[Jens Thoms Toerring]

Dear Al,

On Wed, Dec 28, 2011 at 02:19:49AM +0100, alessandro basili wrote:
> I am trying to open my application in a given position on my Desktop and
> I am aware of the fl_winposition. Unfortunately I am too lazy to modify
> my application (indeed all of them...) to accept an additional command
> line option to get the position - indeed is not only laziness, the
> command-line interface is standardized and it does accept only specific
> options.
> 
> Does anyone out there know how to locate the application somewhere in
> the desktop without the need to use fl_winposition? I was thinking about
> some environment variable or maybe just some other way to pass the
> option to the window manager.

As far as I can see there unfortunately doesn't seem to be any
good way to achieve that. A "geometry" string passed to the pro-
gram isn't interpreted by XForms. Nor are any settings, e.g.
from the .Xresources file, taken into account. And using a
geonetry atring argument or setting a position/size via an
X resource are the two ways to do it I'm familiar with. And
within XForms when calling fl_show_form() only sizes and
positions are used that have been set via fl_set_form_size(),
fl_set_form_position() or fl_set_form_geometry() - in case
a 'place' value has been passed to fl_show_form() that
asks for evaluation of position or size information.

Personally, I always have used that when there was a need
for placing a form at a certain position. On the other
hand it indeed could be useful to set a position or size
via e.g. a geometry string. Although there would be a few
things to be considered first:

a) Which form is set according to the geomeptry string option?
   It probably would be the "main form" (per default the first
   one to be dispayed unless a different one is set explicitely
   via fl_set_app_mainform())/
b) To facilitate this XForms would have to check for a
   '-geometry' option on the commmand line. Since this
   wasn't done before there can be a number of pplications
   evaluation '-geometry' themselves which thus might break
   when XForms would evaluate '-geometry' and not leave it
   to the application (I got one myself where this would
   be the case since it checks both for a '-geometry' option
   as well as checking the .Xresource file).
c) I guess the form would need to be shown with fl_show_form()
   with the 'place' argument set to 'FL_PLACE_POSITION' and/or
   'FL_PLACE_GEOMETRY' etc. for the geometry string option to
   be used.

I'm not sure yet that this would be a reasonable change,
especially given that it might break existing applications.
Does anyone has an opinion concerning this?

                            Best regards, Jens
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