4 ms·

Does anybody know what's the _current_ status of window decorations in wayland? Client-side decorations was an incredibly poor choice in the original design. Fr

Does anybody know what's the _current_ status of window decorations in wayland? Client-side decorations was an incredibly poor choice in the original design. From the screenshot I cannot tell if it's just a custom theme or the "wm" is drawing them.

FreeFull 9y ago
The WM is drawing its own decorations, but in the screenshot you can also see that the GTK+ programs are drawing decorations too, so you've got two layers of decorations.
sfar 9y ago
AFAIK it's unchanged. The Wayland spec doesn't really concern itself with decorations. It's up to the apps and compositor to figure it out. QT allows decorations to be disabled and so works well with a tiling compositor. GTK doesn't. There are various GTK patches and hacks floating around to address this but nothing upstream. Older software generally works well by virtue of pre-dating client-side decorations.
- usernam 9y ago
  I don't expect anything anymore from GTK given it's current track record. The latest issue I discovered was the 'letter' to filename shortcut you used to have in file dialogs. It now triggers recursive search instead. Incredibly irritating, especially when used with large and/or FUSE directories, even considering there's a one line patch to allow customization though dconf which has been ignored since more than one year. GTK 3 has been downhill usability-wise for me. One of the primary reasons I've stopped as a developer to use it entirely.
  - okbake 9y ago
    The recursive search is frustrating. I'm so used to doing <first few letters><enter> to navigate from the root directory all the way down to what I'm looking for. It's not only the small hangs while it searches but also the information overload with all of the results when I'm only ever looking for a specific sub directory in the directory I'm currently in. I guess I'm so used to using it as a hotkey instead of a search.
    - usernam 9y ago
      The additional problem is that the search results are also incrementally updated. On an open dialog, I had in three different occasions click on a result just to automatically select an unwanted [new] result. Also, the path bar is long gone. It used to support tab completion, which was actually faster than selecting files and/or searching for them. I don't know what they're thinking. The list of gripes I have with GTK 3 is increasing at each release.
- wander_homer 9y ago
  Wait a second, how does Qt do that? If the application developer chooses to use client side decorations in an application, e.g. something similar to GtkHeaderBar, how does Qt know how the application should look like with client side decorations disabled, without the application developer explicitly adding support for that?
  - sfar 9y ago
    I'm not sure if this completely answers your question but ... Ordinarily QT will automatically render decorations inside an application's Wayland window, but if the QT_WAYLAND_DISABLE_WINDOWDECORATION environment variable is set, it only renders the content inside the decorations. The window manager can them draw it's own decorations around the outside, when it composites the desktop. It's not ideal. There's no mechanism for an application to supply hints to the window manager to control it's decorations like in X. Nor can the application draw custom borders like when using client-side decorations. There's really no other way of implementing the stacking and tabbed window layouts which are popular in tiling window managers though. Thankfully it's good enough for most applications and the compositor can have overrides (e.g in a user config file) for special cases.

FreeFull 9y ago

The WM is drawing its own decorations, but in the screenshot you can also see that the GTK+ programs are drawing decorations too, so you've got two layers of decorations.

sfar 9y ago

AFAIK it's unchanged. The Wayland spec doesn't really concern itself with decorations. It's up to the apps and compositor to figure it out. QT allows decorations to be disabled and so works well with a tiling compositor. GTK doesn't. There are various GTK patches and hacks floating around to address this but nothing upstream. Older software generally works well by virtue of pre-dating client-side decorations.

usernam 9y ago
I don't expect anything anymore from GTK given it's current track record. The latest issue I discovered was the 'letter' to filename shortcut you used to have in file dialogs. It now triggers recursive search instead. Incredibly irritating, especially when used with large and/or FUSE directories, even considering there's a one line patch to allow customization though dconf which has been ignored since more than one year. GTK 3 has been downhill usability-wise for me. One of the primary reasons I've stopped as a developer to use it entirely.
- okbake 9y ago
  The recursive search is frustrating. I'm so used to doing <first few letters><enter> to navigate from the root directory all the way down to what I'm looking for. It's not only the small hangs while it searches but also the information overload with all of the results when I'm only ever looking for a specific sub directory in the directory I'm currently in. I guess I'm so used to using it as a hotkey instead of a search.
  - usernam 9y ago
    The additional problem is that the search results are also incrementally updated. On an open dialog, I had in three different occasions click on a result just to automatically select an unwanted [new] result. Also, the path bar is long gone. It used to support tab completion, which was actually faster than selecting files and/or searching for them. I don't know what they're thinking. The list of gripes I have with GTK 3 is increasing at each release.
wander_homer 9y ago
Wait a second, how does Qt do that? If the application developer chooses to use client side decorations in an application, e.g. something similar to GtkHeaderBar, how does Qt know how the application should look like with client side decorations disabled, without the application developer explicitly adding support for that?
- sfar 9y ago
  I'm not sure if this completely answers your question but ... Ordinarily QT will automatically render decorations inside an application's Wayland window, but if the QT_WAYLAND_DISABLE_WINDOWDECORATION environment variable is set, it only renders the content inside the decorations. The window manager can them draw it's own decorations around the outside, when it composites the desktop. It's not ideal. There's no mechanism for an application to supply hints to the window manager to control it's decorations like in X. Nor can the application draw custom borders like when using client-side decorations. There's really no other way of implementing the stacking and tabbed window layouts which are popular in tiling window managers though. Thankfully it's good enough for most applications and the compositor can have overrides (e.g in a user config file) for special cases.