I got around to building the latest Gimp CVS last night and was playing around with it. This was the first time in about six weeks I had rebuilt, so a few things had changed.

One of the obvious changes was that the new layers dialog wanted to always be on top (I had nuked all my previous gimp preferences and stuff, so what I was seeing was more or less the "default" behaviour). On something like my latop where 1024x768 is the highest resolution it works at, losing one quarter of the screen space to a non-resizable (width-wise) dialog box is a pretty big penalty. Even on my desktop (a little larger, but stil a 17" monitor, so it's only 1280x1024 or whatever), this is a bit of a nuisance.

Now, it may be that there is some side-effect going on here, since I was building against CVS versions of everything (GTK+, metacity, etc). I could not see which window hint was keeping it on top, so maybe this is not an intentional effect.

Is this intentional? Is it desirable? Is it set in stone?

Malcolm

On Thu, 2003-11-06 at 11:52, Sven Neumann wrote:

Malcolm Tredinnick writes:

One of the obvious changes was that the new layers dialog wanted to always be on top (I had nuked all my previous gimp preferences and stuff, so what I was seeing was more or less the "default" behaviour). On something like my latop where 1024x768 is the highest resolution it works at, losing one quarter of the screen space to a non-resizable (width-wise) dialog box is a pretty big penalty. Even on my desktop (a little larger, but stil a 17" monitor, so it's only 1280x1024 or whatever), this is a bit of a nuisance.

Now, it may be that there is some side-effect going on here, since I was building against CVS versions of everything (GTK+, metacity, etc). I could not see which window hint was keeping it on top, so maybe this is not an intentional effect.

Is this intentional? Is it desirable? Is it set in stone?

No, this is a bug in metacity. GIMP doesn't ask the window manager to keep the dock windows on top. All we do is to set a window type hint of "utility window". This seems to be the closest match from the types specified in the window manager spec. Metacity has its own interpretation how this type should be implemented. Details are in Bugzilla:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=115092

Unfortunately the metacity developers seem unwilling to fix this. If all else fails, we will have to make the window type hint optional.

Oh. That is not going to be pleasant to resolve. :-(

Thanks for the explanation in any case. I know where to point my guns now.

BTW: Take a look at the gtkrc file that is installed into your personal gimp directory (~/.gimp-1.3). If you uncomment the line that says class "GtkWidget" style "gimp-small-style", you get a more compact GIMP user interface.

Nice. Thanks. :-)

Cheers,
Malcolm