Rootless mode revisited...

[Thomas Chadwick]

I just had a thought on how to implement rootless mode and I'm hoping 
someone more familiar with Windows programming and/or the XWin server might 
let me know if it's a dead-end before I spend too much time researching it 
further.

The idea I had is this:  Can we exploit the features of the Windows API that 
allow for non-rectangular windows to achieve a "pseudo-rootless" mode?  I 
have looked into it enough to find that non-rectangular Windows windows are 
really collections of multiple rectangles, ellipses, etc.  Seems to me XWin 
could exploit this by simply {adding|removing} a rectangle {to|from} the 
collection that makes up its shape whenever an Xclient is 
{created|destroyed}.

I call it "pseudo-rootless" mode because you would still need to run an 
XWindows window manager to decorate the Xclients, as opposed to having the 
Windows window manager do the decoration.

What I don't know is how well Windows will handle, for instance, moving an 
Xclient window around once it's been created, since that would involve 
dynamically manipulating the shape of a Windows window.

What I also don't know is whether or not the way XWin uses DirectDraw and 
frame-buffering somehow precludes the use of the Windows window-shaping 
APIs.


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