Why can't Xorg show Live Previews of minimized programs?

Linuxboy877 · 01-21-2011, 05:03 AM

Hello,

My question is, why can't Xorg show live previews of minimized X clients? Mac OS X is the only OS that can, and I have no good idea why.

Would somebody please enlighten me and tell me when support might be available in Xorg for this?

redgoblin · 01-21-2011, 06:24 AM

Quote:

why can't Xorg show live previews of minimized X clients?

The X server is only concerned with basic window management. Functionality such as live previews of minimised windows is the sort of extra 'fluff' that you tend to find in Desktop Environments. I know KDE 4 does it (and possibly recent versions of Gnome, but I couldn't confirm that) but it's not the sort of feature I'd expect to see in the core X server.

Are you sure that your question is about X? Are you using a window manager like Openbox, Kwin, Compiz, etc? or beyond that a desktop environment like KDE, Gnome or XFCE?

adamk75 · 01-21-2011, 06:39 AM

When a window is minimized, the X server stops updating the pixmap for the window. So compiz, for example, is unable to query the X server to provide the image. KDE gets around this simply by not minimizing the window (though it requires enabling a specific option in the settings) and instead just hides the window. This was never implemented in compiz, at least through the 0.8.* series. I'm not sure about the 0.9.* version. The compiz developers really considered that to be a nasty hack that they had no desire to support.

Linuxboy877 · 01-23-2011, 07:51 PM

Why can't somebody just make a simple patch to the X server so that the X server keeps on updating the pixmap for the window when the window is minimized only IF a compositing manager is enabled and possibly the compositing manager is on a user-provided whitelist?

adamk75 · 01-23-2011, 07:54 PM

I'm pretty sure this kind of thing has been discussed on the appropriate mailing lists. Perhaps try google.

Adam