Exclusive Fullscreen Mode

Tomas Carnecky tom at dbservice.com
Mon Sep 6 11:17:38 PDT 2010


On 9/6/10 5:53 PM, Roland Plüss wrote:
>  I tried searching on the Internet for informations on how to take over
> the screen using Xlib. I think here about fullscreen exclusive access
> like for example SDLMAME does it. I stumbled so far though only on one
> single mentioning of an Xlib call which should allow switching a window
> into a FullscreenExclusiveMode. I could though find nothing about such a
> call nor this FullscreenExclusiveMode. Has anybody an idea what this
> FullscreenExclusiveMode could be or in general how one can make a window
> take over the entire screen?

X11 doesn't have a 'fullscreen' mode like windows. What you have to do
is: resize and move the window so that it covers the whole screen.
However, some window managers won't let you place windows wherever you
want (because they also want to draw window decorations etc), so the
modern way to fullscreen your application is to tell the window manager.
The window manager will then resize your window and make sure it's on
top of all other windows. You can do that by setting _NET_WM_STATE to
_NET_WM_STATE_FULLSCREEN. See [1] and/or google 'ewmh fullscreen' or
variations thereof.

tom

[1]: http://standards.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/wm-spec-latest.html#id2551694




More information about the xorg mailing list