X11 fullscreen

[Daniel Stone]

On Sat, Jan 30, 2010 at 12:04:41AM +1100, Russell Shaw wrote:
> Daniel Stone wrote:
> > On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 10:53:11AM +1100, Russell Shaw wrote:
> >> One can make their own widget libraries based on Xlib, then write apps
> >> using the libraries. Nothing hard about that ("hard" is relative;)
> > 
> > It's not 'hard' in the sense of being groundbreaking CS research, no,
> > but it would take an immense amount of time to get non-Western scripts
> > (including bidi), accessibility, copy & paste, full ICCCM compliance
> > including doing the right thing with EWMH, input (including input
> > methods), selections, etc working properly and correctly.  Oh, and your
> > app doesn't look anything like any other app now.
> 
> All that is done to a degree. Theming engine allows apps to look and act
> like any other system. Once you architect the full depth of the problem
> with minimal things that work at every stage, you can add more parallelable
> features whenever required.

OK, sounds like it should be pretty easy for you to knock up?

> > Ooh yeah, and your app has no concept of double-clicking.  You could
> > reimplement it and have it be completely different to the rest of the
> > system (different maximum time between clicks, different maximum
> > distance between click positions, etc) if you like.  All the little
> > stuff like this really does add up.
> 
> Would you like a ctrl-shift+triple-middle-click popup menu? I only make
> useability different if i know it's the right thing to do.

No, I just want double-clicking to work.

> > Please, please, stop telling people to write their own toolkits; it's
> > quite possibly the worst advice I've ever heard on this list, to be
> > honest.
> 
> I didn't say it would be unconditionally easy, but to solve an
> immediate engineering problem of drawing to a full screen and having
> a menu, Xlib + OpenGL + Glut is fairly easy.

I assume their requirements will eventually run deeper than 'full
screen, one menu'.

> Progressing on from that and creating new widgets is useful innovation
> that can solve many more problems.

No, it's not useful innovation at all.

> All the answers to do anything you want is available on the web, email
> lists, and in books. It's definitely not quick and easy to do the whole
> thing.

No, hence why someone asking how to do something eye-wateringly simple,
we should recommend they use existing toolkits.

> I wouldn't be recommending any of this if i found existing widget toolkits
> easy to make new non-trivial widgets that run well. I've battled widget
> toolkits since Windows95. The code for various existing X toolkits is
> inpenetrable, and made overly complex for porting to non-X systems
> that i don't require. Having thought through many problems, these
> codebases can be more comprehensible, but what's the use when one
> has had to figure out how to make a toolkit in order to figure out
> how to fix one?

He doesn't want non-trivial widgets, he wants full-screen and a menu,
remember? That's not something that requires fixing a toolkit.
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