4 ms·
The different sorts of 'iconification' of windows in X
- ggm 4y agoThe meta ontology of X is fascinating. Clearly for an icon to do it's job there has to be an integral drawn region (probably with a clipping mask), and it has to in principle be reactive to mouse and keyboard and so be updated, and reflect other changes so has to be call-back active.. but we name it an icon, even though it is to the X server just another named region with standard attributes like a border and all the usual callbacks any other window has. So an icon is just.. another kind of window. Don't get me started on talking to an 80+ year old Lithuanian about "icons" on his iPhone. He looks up to the wall where he has what is more properly called an icon where he comes from.
- sedatk 4y agoThat kind of blanket term for the most basic entity that can hook up to the event and paint loop exists in all GUIs. I believe it's also "window" in Windows. It was "widget" in Amiga's UI library, Intution, and it was "view" in Borland's TurboVision.
- teddyh 4y agoTL;DR: X11 itself does not have any concept of “icons” or a “minimized” window, but the ICCCM & EWMH (the standard for how X11 window managers and applications should interoperate) does. Additionally, most window managers don’t use window icons anymore, but instead moves minimized windows to some sort of task bar, and do not, therefore, show any “icon” image which the application might have configured using the old standards.
- Sniffnoy 4y ago> However, this 'icons on the desktop' approach has been out of fashion since people started building X desktop environments that used the same general ideas as macOS and Windows. Both of those have always used icons on the desktop for passive objects that had yet to be opened or activated, not active applications; active application windows were collected together in a taskbar. Note that Windows only started doing this with the taskbar in Windows 95; prior to that, it did turn windows into icons when minimized.
- anyfoo 4y agoTrue. There were the "passive" icons the article means in Program Manager, but there were also the "active" icons you mean on the Windows desktop itself. They may be easy to overlook however, because the desktop was much less frequented before Windows 95, however. With the File Explorer and Program Manager being separate applications, there just wasn't much to do on the Desktop.
- pavlov 4y agoIndeed. In Windows versions 1-3, minimized window didn’t actually go away, they were still being asked to paint themselves. Raymond Chen explains: ” Under the old model, when a window was minimized, it displayed as an icon, the icon had a particular position on the screen, and the program drew the icon in response to paint messages. (Of course, most programs deferred to DefWindowProc which just drew the icon.) In other words, the window never went away; it just changed its appearance.” https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20041028-00/?p=37453 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20041028-00/?p=37...
- zamadatix 4y agoDesktop icons as windows is not something I've ever experienced or even thought about but seems surprisingly obvious as an option in retrospect. I've really gotten into the way tiling WMs do different things these last few years too, I wonder what other tidbits like this I might not have learned about!
- donio 4y agoRegarding the last paragraph with the question about tiling WMs, with the ones that I've worked with there are no icons, only visible or non-visible windows. The ICCCM "IconicState" WM_STATE is still handled and mapped to hidden.