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Re: Multiwindow request


On Mon, 2 Jun 2003, Earle F. Philhower III wrote:

> Howdy Igor...
> At 11:05 PM 6/2/2003 -0400, you wrote:
> >Umm, Earle, you didn't quote the complete message.  The shortcut is almost
> >what I was suggesting in the first part of it (quoted below):
> >At 04:12 PM 6/2/2003 -0400, I wrote:
> > > IMO, the ability to start clients is the function of the window manager.
> > > I know fvwm provides such, and so do KDE and CDE.  In multiwindow mode,
> > > the window manager is native windows (Explorer?), which has its own start
> > > menu and its own desktop management, so those are the tools that should be
> > > used to start new clients.  The only way in which the Explorer WM is
> > > different from the traditional WMs (like fvwm, etc) is that it's not aware
> > > of the DISPLAY value (which may or may not be a problem).
> >                         ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> >The reason I wrote the second part (which you did quote) was that the
> >Explorer context menu would not know the value of DISPLAY to set for the
> >X clients it would start...  An X client would, of course, know it.  BTW,
> >that value is not necessarily "<mymachine>:0.0"...
> >IIRC, Cygwin already requires some version of IE to be installed on 95 to
> >function correctly (it may even be IE4, have to check the code).
>
> Sorry, I didn't mean to misquote you.  But your local host and display # is
> always the same, no?  Especially under Windoze where your desktop doesn't
> follow you like a SunRay or just a plain XDCMP session?  My work machine is
> always xx.yy.zz:0.0, and my home is always bigearle:0.0.  If you use -display
> in the xterm command line, it imports that environment variable into its shell
> so clients started from that xterm automatically pick the correct display.
> In fact, a shortcut like that's what I have in my work setup, and that's what
> commercial apps like eXceed do (of course, eXceed 8.0 also hangs more often
> than XWin but that's what you're paying the $$$ for 8P)...

Earle,

No problem.

However, your statement about the display number is only correct if you
run the X server with default options (and then you can always use
"localhost:0.0").  IIRC, you can run *multiple* X servers on different
displays (which would result in different screen numbers, e.g., 1.0).
Even with Exceed you can create multiple screens (in the same X server,
though).

With Exceed (Xstart, rather) you can actually pass "@d" as the display
value, which gets substituted by the number of the current screen (not
sure how, though).  If you hard-code the display value into the shortcut,
it won't work for people with multiple screens.

The idea with the X client was that you could run one of them per screen,
and then the application run from the appropriate section of the root menu
(added by the corresponding client) would be opened on the corresponding
screen.  For example, suppose the client adds a sub-menu named "Root Menu
for Screen #", where "#" is the screen number that it's running on, to the
desktop context menu.  So, if you have 3 screens, you'll have "Root Menu
for Screen 0" through "Root Menu for Screen 2", and if you select the
xterm entry from the first one, you'll get an xterm on screen 0
("localhost:0.0"), and so on.  This client could be automatically started
when multiwindow mode is used...
	Igor
-- 
				http://cs.nyu.edu/~pechtcha/
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     |,4-  ) )-,_. ,\ (  `'-'		Igor Pechtchanski
    '---''(_/--'  `-'\_) fL	a.k.a JaguaR-R-R-r-r-r-.-.-.  Meow!

"I have since come to realize that being between your mentor and his route
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