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sexyfish

EsperantÒC
iPerl
make.pl Opera utilities 		Here I explain various (currently one :-) ideas I'd love to see in sawfish, but won't necessarily find the time, or know how, to implement them myself.

Variable and window-property: frame-orientation

Why are title bars always above windows?  In any printed publication captions are under the pictures, so that would be more logical.  And what I miss most from Enlightenment are the sideways title bars -- way cool and very useful for programming, when windows can't be tall enough!  But E does it in a haphazard way which breaks switching themes, and makes a lot of work for the inclined theme designer.

Here now is a proposition to get eight times as many themes for sawfish, without having to touch one theme!  The core mechanism which draws frames would have a new feature to transpose images and coordinates.

What looks like a didgeridoo painting in the examples are the torn off bodies of the windows, because in the standard microGUI theme not much happens on the other three sides.  The orientations would be called:

  • top-left: the unmodified default, named after where most themes put the title or where westerners start writing on a page.
  • bottom-left: every y coordinate turned upside down, and the title position adjusted accordingly.
  • top-right: likewise for x coordinates.
  • bottom-right: likewise for both x and y coordinates.
  • leftside-bottom: the unmodified default, rotated by 90°.  (Sawfish would have to pretend the window-width were the height and vice versa, while calling functions to calculate the frame.)
  • rightside-bottom: likewise, plus same effects as the first four orientations.
  • leftside-top: -"-
  • rightside-top: -"-
For the title direction there'd be a variable sideways-title-direction with these values:
  • upward: as in the last four examples.
  • downward: the opposite.
  • outward: the baseline near the window, making the letters grow outward, i.e. the rightsides write downward.
  • original: like the original theme design, in this case always starting at the triangle button and writing towards the three buttons, i.e. the tops write downward.

Notice how I lied to you about the themes not needing to be changed.  If you look closely, you'll see the arrows being unmodified by the transformations.  This would be an optional frame-part attribute allowing certain elements to retain their aspect for easing recognition.

Also there might be a change to shading, such that the title stays where it is, and the rest of the window disappears.

Shouldn't be too hard to do? Maybe only with gdk-pixbuf, if that's the future...

(Last modified 2002-11-20)