[geeks] nVidia 8800GT for Apple Mac Pro

[Shannon Hendrix]

On May 21, 2008, at 22:22 , der Mouse wrote:

>>> Of course I'm glossing over the effect of "please redraw your
>>> windows now please" which is how (I think) X handles off-screen
>>> windows.
>> I believe that "please redraw your windows now please" is how
>> traditionally off screen windows were handled by window managers that
>> supported off screen windows.
>
> Ummm...unless you're talking about X specifically on the Mac (and even
> then, it would be implementation-dependent), this betrays an ignorance
> of how X handles window redrawing, including redrawing of window
> portions formerly off-screen but now on-screen.

[ snip ]

You are talking about redraws triggered by expose events.

He's talking about redraws triggered by map and unmap events.   
Technically a window mapping might only be a fast copy from cached  
screen memory, but it isn't uncommon for an Expose event to be  
generated to ensure the window is updated smoothly.

What he's talking about is that some X pagers "move" to another  
desktop by telling one set of apps to unmap their windows, and another  
to map them.  It's the same thing as when you close a window.  Combine  
this with pagers and "taskbars" that know which windows are current,  
and you get the illusion of multiple spaces.

There are even standards to cover this, though they were pretty poorly  
done for a long time.

Another common method was to just have a huge 2D space and the window  
manager would relocate to different parts of it to page.

Some window managers like fvwm were famous for having both methods and  
you could get into some very interesting confusion because of that.


-- 
Shannon Hendrix
shannon at widomaker.com