Re: GNUstep and compositing?

[Truls Becken]

Jon "Top Hat" Jones wrote:

> I want to have a GNUstep desktop environment (DE), with the wonderful dock
> and clip (I love them boxes), but with support for compositing, such as
> Compiz Fusion.

[snip]

> I am perfectly willing to write the code myself, if someone will point me in
> the right direction.

I think a standalone Dock.app would be the best approach, so that you
could run any window manager you want and still have a nice, working
dock. It could add capabilities similar to those of wmaker's Clip
and/or the NeXTstep Fiend to make room for more than a single column.

A common question on the mailing list is how to get rid of the app
icons in foreign environments. Currently, the answer is to write a
defaults value, but it would be much nicer if free floating icons did
not exist in the first place. They should only appear when there is a
dock running. Incidentally, this is how it works on Mac OS X, where
you can kill the Dock so that there is no trace left of app icons
until you launch Dock.app again.

This will take some work, will require major changes to gnustep-gui,
and will probably break Window Maker, but I really think it is worth
it. Oh, and I do not mean a half baked solution like the GWorkspace
Dock. It is important to retain the possibility for applications to
add functionality to their app icons.

-Truls