[openbox] GrowToEdge actions should not shrink, should ignore window size hints

chombee chombee at lavabit.com
Mon Oct 5 09:43:44 EDT 2009


Actually I thought some more about this. Even if the shrink behaviours 
was removed from the grow actions, I think you still wouldn't be able to 
combine the grow actions to implement the fill actions I described.

Currently if I do a GrowToEast, for example, and my window grows until 
it bumps into another window edge, then I do GrowToEast again, the 
window will grow over the window edge that it's touching and go to the 
next one. This makes sense if you're using GrowToEast on its own and 
you do it twice in a row like that. But I think it would break attempts 
at implementing fill by combining multile grows actions under one 
keybind.

So I think there's an argument for three separate sets of actions: 
GrowTo[North|East|South|West], ShrinkFrom[North|East|South|West], and 
Fill, FillHorizontal and FillVertical.

I still think shrink behaviour should be separated from the grow 
actions. Here's another use case. I grow a window to the east a few 
times, jumping over a few edges. Now I want to undo that, shrink it from 
the east so the window is back as it was before the last grow. I can't 
do this. If I use GrowToWest for example the window will expand fom the 
west rather than shrink from the east. Nor can I use repeated GrowToEast 
actions to get what I want. Once you grow a window, there is no going 
back. If shrink and grow were separate actions then I could use 
ShrinkFromEast to undo a GrowToEast.

On Sun, Oct 04, 2009 at 12:24:42AM +0100, chombee wrote:
> Playing with openbox's GrowToEdge[North|East|South|West] actions. I 
> noticed that if I do a GrowToEdgeNorth, for example, and the window 
> cannot grow any further north, then it will shrink from its bottom edge 
> instead. This is highly unexpected!
> 
> Unexpected behaviour one: there is some space above my terminal window, 
> but not enough for the terminal to grow by the height of one row of 
> characters, and since openbox follows the terminal's window-size hint it 
> cannot grow the window any further, trying to grow the terminal upwards 
> will actually shrink it from the bottom even though there is visible 
> empty space above the terminal window.
> 
> Unexpected behaviour two: I try to implement a "Fill" action by having a 
> keybind that executes all four of the GrowToEdge actions in turn, so the 
> window will fill the space available to it without overlapping any other 
> windows. This, along with FillHorizontal and FillVertical actions, seems 
> to me like it would be a really useful shortcut. However, I believe 
> becuase of this shrink behaviour, the results are bizarre and confusing. 
> Try it.
> 
> I think the Grow actions would be much easier to use if they just grew, 
> and if they can't grow any further then just do nothing! Shrink actions 
> could be implemented as separate actions. It'd be nice if the actions 
> had an option to ignore window-size hints from terminal apps also, so 
> you don't get these little gaps.
> 
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