Resizing problem

[Jon TURNEY]

On 15/07/2010 18:02, Olwe Melwasul wrote:
> I installed cygwin/xcygwin 1.7.5 with KDE.

I don't know where you got KDE from, but it's not in the standard cygwin 
distribution.  If you have problems with KDE, perhaps you should try the place 
you got it from.

> I tried clicking on XWin
> Server from the Start menue, but nothing happened. I tried startx from
> the
> cygwin basic terminal. Nothing. After some Google archaeology, I found
> someone that had done this:
>
> cd \cygwin\bin
> ash
> PATH=. rebaseall -v
>
> at the DOS command. Good. It worked. Running startx at the cygwin
> command did start a twm session. But how the KDE would run, I couldn't
> figure out from any amount of documentation or Googling.

Given the rest of this email, I find it hard to believe that the documentation 
you read included 'man Xwin' or the Cygwin/X User Guide [1]

If you did, and you found it unclear, I'd welcome your suggestions as to how 
to improve that documentation.

> After some
> more Googling, I saw a reference to an Openbox. Guessing along, I got
> startx /usr/bin/openbox to give me Openbox. My problem is that I
> cannot minimize anything because it goes down below and out of sight.

Nope.  What's happening here is that you have no panel/taskbar running, so 
there is nothing to show minimized applications.  Openbox is just a Window 
Manager.

> The XWin container window is sized on start up to my right computer
> screen, but when I drag it over to my larger left screen, it can't be
> resized.

from 'man XWin': "The display mode can not be changed once the X server has 
started."  We do not currently support resizing the X screen of a running X 
server.

> I suspect Openbox has a default size larger (lower?) and down
> in the hidden part is no doubt either a task bar with the minimized
> apps or the minimized apps themselves, right?

Wrong, as explained above.

 > Alt-Tab only cycles the
> Win7 apps, not the XWin session apps, BTW.

This behaviour is by design. [2]

If you want to allow the X server to capture alt-tab key presses, you should 
read about the -keyhook option in 'man XWin':

"-[no]keyhook: Enable [disable]  a  low-level  keyboard  hook for catching 
special keypresses like Menu and Alt+Tab and passing them to the X Server 
instead of letting Windows handle them."

And indeed 'startx /usr/bin/openbox-session -- -keyhook' gives you an openbox 
session where you can switch windows using alt-tab.

It's kind of unfortunate that the default configuration of openbox and the X 
server interact in this way to make it difficult to work out how to get your 
minimized applications back, and we could certainly do with some words in the 
User's Guide about using the WMs we provide, but that would best be written by 
someone who actually uses them, which isn't me :-)

> Actually, I don't need the startx version, I could very well use the
> startxwin multi-windows version IF I could get Emacs in shell mode to
> do cygwin bash. Starting the X server and then Emacs multi-windows
> style gets a shell mode that apparently doesn't see cygwin. I'm
> guessing it's using the DOS command.
>
> How can I a) get at the minimized apps? or b) how can I get a
> stand-alone X server-run Emacs to see cygwin bash?

[1] http://x.cygwin.com/docs/ug/cygwin-x-ug.html
[2] http://x.cygwin.com/docs/ug/using-switching.html

-- 
Jon TURNEY
Volunteer Cygwin/X X Server maintainer

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