[3ddesktop-dev] Re: Shortcuts and grey screens

On Fri, 2005-06-03 at 12:54 +0200, Mathias Weyland wrote:

> You have to acquire all the workspaces. If you've never been on desk 5 for
> example, how shall 3ddesktop know how it looks like?. 

> We already have that feature. Check the config file and look for
> autoacquire.
> 

I think he is referring to a slightly different solution. I know this is
very difficult, especially when you don't even know for sure what window
manager is going to be used, but I think he's thinking of something more
like Enlightenment's pager. It was an option that lets it slowly troll
through the desktops (even the desktops that you're not on currently)
and update the snapshot of the desktop that you see in the pager. I have
no idea how Rasterman did that, and I suspect that it could be only
possible to implement on the window manager level. Maybe it could be an
option only available to those running a window manager that supports
it, but a background snatch of the other desktops would be really nice,
and obsolete the --acquire swtiches. The other thing about how the
snapshot is done under Enlightenment, is that it does it very slowly.
The impact on the machine is virtually invisible. One problem with the
autoacquire setting is that many people see their machine stutter every
time the current desktop is acquired. I am running a very fast machine,
and the stutter is still noticeable, so I disable autoacquire and just
let it get the snapshot as it zooms out, which is not nearly as
noticeable. 3ddesk is the only method I use to switch desktops, so that
works just fine for me.

Incidentally, isn't the imlib2 that 3ddesk uses to get the snapshots
also written by Rasterman? I wonder if the functionality that snapshots
non-active desktops, and does it at a low priority (doesn't do the whole
screen at once, it grabs it line by line) is actually part of
Enlightenment or if it's included in imlib2. 

> - Use my patch which copies the first screenshot to all desks when 3ddeskd
> is run with the --mirror option. So you can save the acquiration time, but
> that only helpful if all of your desks look (almost) the same.

Very nice trick.. Is Brad going to work that into one of the next
releases at some point? (I'm too lazy to patch.. I use apt for
everything these days ;)..

-Jeff

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