Re: Nailing down GUI's

[Jon Elson <jmelson-at-artsci.wustl.edu>]

Paul Corner wrote:

>  One for the GUI/Xwindows experts.
>
> Is there aneasy way of getting a GUI - be it Xemc or tkemc to appear in the
> same screen position every time emc is run ?
> I have a few thoughts of using a touch screen as part of the man-machine
> interface (thanks Arne) and forsee a few problems if the GUI is in a different
> position every time.

There certainly are X primitives to command the window manager to force
position, alignment, sizing, etc. for a program window on initialization, or at
any other time.  I've used them on some other systems.  I'm not sure if the
program needs to read these requests through the command line and then
hand them to X, but I think that is the way it is done.  In other words,
if a progam has no code to ask for a specific position or alignment, then
the window manager will make assumptions based on the window size and
place the window where IT wants to, and I don't think there is an easy
way to over ride that, at least until the window is up there.  But, these
things aren't too hard to do.  Maybe we should ask for the code to be
put in, and the new keywords to be added to those already parsed for
the command line.

Now, in Tk/tcl, I think it can be done in the scripting language, and no
actual machine code needs to be changed and recompiled.  The screen
position would have to be set up in the Tk/tcl file.

Jon