Re: [MACTCL] Popup Boxes on MacTclTk

[Daniel A. S. <st...@ic...>]

Jim,

At 9:35 -0700 on 28/8/01, Jim Ingham wrote:
>I don't think you want to make the overrideredirect windows float, 
>since overrideredirect  only changes look, not behavior on X11 and 
>Windows, but floating windows have different behavior (for instance 
>they vanish when the Application is backgrounded, and they don't 
>receive keystrokes).

well on unix overrideredirect changes behaviour as a consequence of 
the fact that the window is no longer a normal window, i.e. the 
window manager ignores it for the purposes of <enter>/<leave>  and 
focus detection, doesn't decorate it etc. There seems to be no way to 
get exactly that behaviour in the current (pre Carbon) MacOS Window 
Manager.

as I said I don't think making overrideredirect windows float is 
really a good solution, but in some sense it is as bad as the current 
behaviour, with the looks now wrong but more correct behaviour...

maybe a better solution would be to modify GeneratePollingEvents() to 
not only ignore floating windows in front of the current window but 
also windows with the override_redirect flag set. Possibly this could 
also be achieved by changing TkpIsWindowFloating() to check for 
override_redirect. Maybe this is worth a try?
(unix TkpChangeFocus() seems to do something similar to cope with 
certain X window managers, i.e. it ignores windows with 
override_redirect set)

>The better solution here is to add the kHelpWindowClass window type 
>to the list of types in unsupported1.  This is available only in 
>carbonlib 1.1, but that is fairly common, and not hard to install on 
>older (8.5 era) machines. This gives you the correct help tag look 
>(which is more than just overrideredirect.)

the problem is that you can't use carbon features selectively, if you 
want to use any carbon feature such as the kHelpWindowClass you have 
to go carbon all the way, which we can't really do with classic Tk...
Do you know how OS9 popup balloons get the window manger to 
essentially ignore them?  popup balloons would seem to have features 
equivalent to what we would like for overrideredirect... I suspect 
this  was done by hacking a custom case into OS window layering code 
though.

In any case for the purpose of Tk popup balloons, the 'unsupported1 
style  floating sideTitlebar' solution works well enough for me, the 
looks aren't so bad (see attached), so this is not really an urgent 
problem.

Cheers,

Daniel
-- 
** Daniel A. Steffen          **  "And now to something completely
** Department of Mathematics  **   different"    Monty Python
** Macquarie University       ** <mailto:st...@ma...>
** NSW 2109 Australia         ** <http://www.maths.mq.edu.au/~steffen/>