Re: new command: raise

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Tuesday 09 December 2003 10:08, Daniel J Sebald wrote:
> Petr Mikulik wrote:
> >It seems like most people agree that this patch is useful! Great!

I cannot comment on how useful it is under Windows, OS2, etc.
If you need it, then fine.

But I am not yet convinced it is useful in an X11 environment.
There are better solutions available at a higher level (the window
manager).

I do take your point that the window title is not always obvious.=20
We have a "set term ... title 'foo'" option, but the user may not always
think to take advantage of it.  Maybe we should add  an auto-title=20
feature, similar to the auto-titling of plots themselves?
If the user has set an explicit title, then use that one.  If the user ha=
s
not set a window title, then set it to match the title of the current plo=
t
displayed in the window. Does that sound reasonable?

> >Now, it does not have to be the current terminal. You can implement it
> >in exactly the same way as in OS/2's PM terminal.
> >
> >command.h:
> >+#ifdef OS2
> >+extern void pm_raise_terminal_window();
> >+#endif
> >+#ifdef X11
> >+extern void x11_raise_terminal_window(   maybe option for 1 window );
> >+#endif

This approach runs roughshod over the existing terminal API and=20
coding philosophy, at least as I understand it.  Driver functions should =
be
exposed via the driver's TERM_TABLE, and called in a driver-independent
fashion.  Yes, we have some legacy code that does not operate this way
but do we really need to create more bad examples?

> (*term_interactive)->attributes()
>
> "term_interactive" is a new pointer that is associated with
> the interactive terminal.  The existing "term" pointer remains
> just as it is.  (Ethan, will this work for your concept of PNG,
> etc. when doing research?)

I don't think so.  The PNG driver itself doesn't know anything about
the fact that it is talking through a pipe to a display program.  So it
has no way of knowing that it is pseudo-interactive.  Anyhow the
mechanism we have now for opening such a pipe:
=09set output '| display png:-'
offers no way to return a process identifier for the display program,
so we cannot send any signals to it, nor do we have any way that I
can think of from inside gnuplot to identify it to the X window manager.

But I also don't think it is necessary.  I am perfectly happy to just
click on the appropriate icon or taskbar entry to raise the window
if I need to.  If appropriate I can even "pin" it via always-on-top so
that it stays visible at all times.

--=20
Ethan A Merritt       merritt@u.washington.edu
Biomolecular Structure Center Box 357742
University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195