[SDL] GUI with KDE

[David Olofson]

On Thursday 11 October 2001 21:28, Josh Stern wrote:
> David Olofson wrote:
> > Well, say it was possible to create child windows in the form of SDL
> > sub-surfaces, with "advanced clipping". If you wanted to throw in a
> > window manager, you could implement it as a "wrapper" for the
> > functions you'd normally use to deal with the management of child
> > windows, and pass all relevant events through a function of the
> > window manager, so it can manage focus, window movement, resizing
> > etc.
> >
> > The real way, however, would be to allow the window manager to hook
> > into SDL, so that applications don't have to explicitly "run" the
> > window manager - it would automatically add contexts for window
> > borders, render them, intercept mouse clicks on them and so on.
> > Applications would just have to be aware that it's possible that
> > punping the event loop may result in windows being moved or resized,
> > and that some events may be translated into WM events.
>
> Take a look at Qt-X11 and Qt-embedded;   they share 95% of their
> code, by the part they don't share is quite differemt;  much more so
> than Qt-X11 and Qt-Win32.   This is because Qt-embedded provides an
> entire windowing system in the frame buffer, like what you describe.
> That is *sometimes* desireable for clients without their own windowing
> system - though it implies some loss of efficiency there - but it's
> never desirable for targets that already have a window system.

Actually, I've seen *exactly* this (WM in WM) in many multimedia 
applications on Win32, and it can also be seen in various X applications. 

(Which is not to say that I think it's a good idea in general. On the 
contrary, a non-standard WM inside another WM is confusing, and Win32 
"MDI" style applications just waste screen space, especially on big 
screens.)


> What I have a need for is  would be satisfied for the clients that
> have a window system by an SDL-like library that
> interacts with the window system for top level windows and
> manages 'sub-windows' of a top level window internally in the
> same process.    The library would translate real window system
> events to events in the intra-process window hierarchy as needed.

Yes, that was the idea here - the "SDL WM" is a different story. 
(Although it may be somewhat related from the API perspective; the idea 
that the SDL WM should look like any other WM to the application for 
example.)


//David Olofson --- Programmer, Reologica Instruments AB

.- M A I A -------------------------------------------------.
|      Multimedia Application Integration Architecture      |
| A Free/Open Source Plugin API for Professional Multimedia |
`----------------------------> http://www.linuxdj.com/maia -'
.- David Olofson -------------------------------------------.
| Audio Hacker - Open Source Advocate - Singer - Songwriter |
`-------------------------------------> http://olofson.net -'