Re: [XBoard-devel] ICS console

[h . g . muller]

Op Do, 21 maart, 2013 11:06 pm schreef Tim Mann:
> I don't know what you have in
> WinBoard now,
> but generally, don't you want to make xboard and WinBoard the same in this
>  area (using whatever ideas are best from both)?
>

In WinBoard I added chatboxes that have a separate window for each chat.
Normally they would stack in the same place with the same size, however.
(I.e. if you open several of them without ever moving a window.) They look
very much like the single Chat Box window I have in XBoard now (with a
Chat-partner text field, and a row of buttons for other chats). The
difference is that if you hit such a button, what it really does is bring
the window of that chat to the top, while in XBoard it replaces the
contents of the single window. In WinBoard you could unstack the chat
boxes if you wanted, to see them all at the same time.

The WinBoard chat boxes are implemented as dialogs of the ICS Interaction
window (so they minimize together with it). I am not very happy with the
way they currently position, which is in the upper left corner of the ICS
console. Of course they could be made to have their own persistent size
and position, remembered in the settings file. They would then all uses
those window parameters when they pop up. The problem is which parameters
to save if the user opened more than one of them, and moved them around.
We could of course just randomly pick one.

Perhaps the Chat Box window of XBoard should also be popped up in multiple
copies, one for each chat. The Xaw version was a bit unreliable in
bringing windows to the foreground, however. The current design in XBoard
of having the ICS console as one of the chats is probably not a good idea.
It is very convenient for developing it as a 'side dish', until it can
really do what the x-term can do now. Then we could move it to a dedicated
window, and abandon the x-term.