[Gllug] KDE window size feedback

[Chris Ball]

We really need an FAQ for questions like this. :-)

I'll get on to your question shortly. To answer it properly, it's
necessary to explain a few things about all of these applications that
run under X.

GNOME and KDE tend to be termed 'desktop environments'. They aren't
window managers, as they don't control windows at all. They give you a
pretty background, a panel to launch things from, and often have their
own programming libraries. GNOME extends the gtk+ toolkit, and KDE is an
application of a toolkit called Qt. 

A window manager, in contrast, is something like Sawfish (nee Sawmill)
or Enlightenment. When a window is sent to your X server, the window
manager handles drawing it, focusing it, resizing it.. the lot. You
don't need to be running a desktop environment like Gnome or KDE to use
a window manager - if you run your desktop from {g,x,k}dm, you can often
experience this by contrasting 'startx && xterm' with 'startx && xterm
&& sawfish' - and you can use a window manager with any desktop
environment.

On 29 Aug 2001 22:10:33 +0100, Steve Cobrin wrote:
> Other Windows Managers I've used allow me to enable getting feedback when
> resizing or moving windows, as to the absolute size or position I'm
> changing to, eg. a little box appears and says 80x32 when grabbing the
> corner of an xterm or 701x693 when grabbing the corner of another
> (non-xterm) window. Fvwm, olvwm and Gnome do this, can KDE?

Right. :-) The window manager you are probably talking about is Sawfish,
which is a popular wm to run alongside Gnome. The options for the
feature you're talking about are in 'Move/Resize->Show current
{position,dimensions} of windows while {moving,resizing}' in the Sawfish
preferences.

The reason you aren't getting this functionality under KDE has nothing
directly to do with KDE; it's behaviour dictated by the window manager.
To solve, you eiter need to: 
 - turn the options above on in the case of you running sawfish, or
 - install sawfish instead of the window manager you're using with kde,
   and do the same, or
 - find out how to turn showing coordinates/dimensions while changing
   them in the window manager you are using.

Hope this helps explain things a little,

~C.

-- 
Chris Ball || chris at void.printf.net || http://printf.net/


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