Re: [Bug: 21.4.12] menus span monitor borders on Xinerama

Tim> The newer Xinerama APIs have ability to query the server and Tim> find out where the monitor boundaries are. (Newer versions Tim> of xscreensaver use these to good effect, as does at least Tim> metacity.) XEmacs isn't a Xinerama application; it's an Xt application. It makes a lot of sense for screen-savers and window managers to be Xinerama- aware, but an ordinary app? Really, this is a deficiency in pop-up management and probably should be handled by fixing Xt or the ICCCM (the standard that defines window manager functionality, to a great extent). That said, simple or well-modularized code to handle the Xinerama APIs would surely be added to 21.5 (devel branch), although it's doubtful for 21.4. (We can cross that bridge when the code is contributed.) Another possibility just struck me. Is it true that XEmacs frames are never placed across monitor boundaries? If so, it would probably be easy to ensure that menus are always placed inside the frame (although I think this is quite ugly, and accessing Xinerama functionality preferable). For these purposes XEmacs is generally not too hard to hack. From your description, I would guess that you probably just need to add code to initialize the Xinerama extension (this might be hard to do right in XEmacs, but it's the kind of thing a core XEmacs hacker can probably help with at very little time cost), and a conditional call to the Xinerama API in the menu-popping code. If you've done any X programming at all, or if you want to try something new, I encourage you to try it. Or if you know the hackers who wrote the code for xscreensaver or metacity, I encourage you to ask them to help with XEmacs. But it's unlikely that a core hacker would volunteer to write the code, because it involves the time to research the Xinerama API, fiddle with stupid undocumented restrictions (I don't know about Xinerama, but diagnosing a SUR in XIM is how I got started hacking XEmacs---X11 is full of them!), and dealing with initial testing (acquiring a monitor, installing Xinerama, etc). But these (with advice from other Xinerama hackers and XEmacs maintainers) are stuff you already mostly have, or can relatively easily get. -- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.