[openbox] placement totally broken?

[Clay Barnes]

On 21:35 Sat 12 Apr     , Ian Zimmerman wrote:
> For all I know, "Smart" and "UnderMouse" are both synonyms for "Random".
> And it has always been so :-(
> 
> I must be doing something wrong, but what?  I am running bare Openbox
> (no Gnome or KDE), single screen, just 4 desktops - pretty vanilla.
> 
> One possibility - does Openbox try any reasonable policy at all when
> it can't find a spot with no overlap?  Or does it really give up and
> revert to randomness?

Yup to the random possibility, at least as of 3.4.6.1, which is what I
use.  There's been talk of implementing another WM's minimum overlap
algorithm, but not a lot of interest.  I actually planned to try my
hand at that to learn the OB3 code until my work started piling up.
:-/


> I always have a small xconsole window and a small gkrellm panel
> running in 2 corners, and this being a laptop with 1024x768
> resolution, my Emacs and Firefox windows don't fit.  But I don't
> mind if the title bar of the xconsole is partially obscured, for
> example.  That is still _much_ better than if all its contents are
> obscured.  So a policy that considers the two outcomes equally bad
> would not be very Smart indeed.

Yeah, I think it's recognized that the placement algorithm could use
some work, but like I mentioned, there hasn't been much interest
relative to other features.


> -- 
> His stride expressed the man's pride and self-confidence
> and his eyes revealed his honest simplicity.
> His appearance indicated that his belly was of far greater importance
> than his head.   Naguib Mahfouz, _Midaq Alley_


-- 
Clay Barnes

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http://www.hci-matters.com

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