GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 80488
Option to set panel level
Last modified: 2002-07-10 19:24:38 UTC
There is no option to make the panel appear below other windows - I need this as I often want to play movies full screen and the GNOME panel was covering parts of the screen! I could set the bottom panel to auto-hide but there is no solution for the menu panel - save being able to set the panel's level.
When did this get removed, Mark? it /is/ a fairly useful feature (as evidenced by the number of people who were complaining about it when sawfish was breaking it...)
In the new window manager spec there is no such thing as the old levels. The window manager hints do provide for full screen views of things. You should file a bug with the movie players if they don't do this properly. also they could just create an override redirect window which will just be above all windows. In any case, this is not a panel bug. It could also be the windowmanager bug if it's not handling such hints properly.
AFAIK, that is not correct- there are levels in the new spec, and sawfish was ignoring them. Am I on crack, Havoc?
There are not levels in the new spec. The movie players would ideally use _NET_WM_WINDOW_STATE_FULLSCREEN (as for "fullscreen mode" in gnome-terminal), and failing that create a big override redirect window as George says. Also this isn't an issue if you have "panel comes to top on mouseover and lower on mouse leave" which is the current metacity policy, though we were discussing changing it to on-top-always in another bug.
Eck. Forcing other programs to be rewritten is just Damn Broken in my book- it just isn't reasonable to assume we're in a purely Free Software 'we'll just fix it and upgrade everyone tomorrow' environment anymore, so saying 'fix your code' isn't a reasonable solution. But not my call, so marking NOTGNOME as George originally did.
Louie, if there were a way to just get it right in the WM we would. But there isn't. A preference to keep panels on the bottom does NOT fix it, most users will NOT find that preference. All the preference does is let hackers work around the problem, so they will not fix it for the 95% of users who need it fixed by default. There is no fix that does not involve fixing applications, because X has not historically had _any_ mechanism for on-top fullscreen windows, other than making a window override redirect and calling XRaiseWindow() in a timeout. The EWMH spec adds a mechanism, now apps can use it.
*** Bug 87786 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***