Window manager / misbehavior in Linux

[Jimmy Blue]

I have just ditched the last of my Sun boxes
and now use Linux machines as my graphics heads.
The window behavior (Sawfish / GNOME) is erratic
and awkward. Specifically, the dialog windows that
pop "up" for property list editing, instance place,
modal commands in general are prone to "pop under"
instead. Then I have to rotate-to-bottom all of the
windows until I find the little bugger. The main
window also seems to raise over the dialog windows
with every select (for example, when I have an open
property-edit window and am serially single-selecting
objects the property edit window keeps going back
under the schematic / layout window whether or not
raise-on-focus is enabled in the Sawfish settings).

So a couple of questions are

1) Is GNOME and/or Sawfish the "right" Linux window
manager? Is there one that Cadence prefers or developed
to?

2) Is there a set of X-window-manager settings that
act more like the Sun-normal behavior with particular
regard to popups / dialogs? Either Cadence-recommended
or personally discovered?

 

[Tim Riehle]

What distribution & version are you running?

I'm using Redhat enterprise WS 3.0 and have had success
running cadence with Gnome/Metacity, KDE and Icewm. I believe
we have also tried (to a limited extent) MWM and blackbox.

I've run cadence on Redhat 7.2 and 8.0 and don't recall any
problems like you describe. We did see some funky behavior
in the waveform viewer, perhaps linked to a crappy video
driver.

Tim

Jimmy Blue wrote:

I have just ditched the last of my Sun boxes
and now use Linux machines as my graphics heads.
The window behavior (Sawfish / GNOME) is erratic
and awkward. Specifically, the dialog windows that
pop "up" for property list editing, instance place,
modal commands in general are prone to "pop under"
instead. Then I have to rotate-to-bottom all of the
windows until I find the little bugger. The main
window also seems to raise over the dialog windows
with every select (for example, when I have an open
property-edit window and am serially single-selecting
objects the property edit window keeps going back
under the schematic / layout window whether or not
raise-on-focus is enabled in the Sawfish settings).

So a couple of questions are

1) Is GNOME and/or Sawfish the "right" Linux window
manager? Is there one that Cadence prefers or developed
to?

2) Is there a set of X-window-manager settings that
act more like the Sun-normal behavior with particular
regard to popups / dialogs? Either Cadence-recommended
or personally discovered?

 

[Pete nospam Zakel]

In article <1103220340.530258.27930@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com> "Jimmy Blue" <jimmyblue@hotmail.com> writes:

The window behavior (Sawfish / GNOME) is erratic
and awkward. Specifically, the dialog windows that
pop "up" for property list editing, instance place,
modal commands in general are prone to "pop under"
instead. Then I have to rotate-to-bottom all of the
windows until I find the little bugger.

I'm pretty sure this is controllable via window manager settings that are,
unfortunately, obscure and hard to find. I found it before when some of our
engineers were first working with Linux -- it has something to do with
settings like "allow primary windows on top" or "force transient windows to
top" or something like that. Unfortunately, I can't find my notes (this was
2 years ago or more), so I can't tell you exactly what the setting was. I do
remember it took me about 20 minutes to figure it out.

-Pete Zakel
(phz@seeheader.nospam)

Glubbule (glub' yule) n. The eerie announcement, appearance, and
ascension of the bubble in a water cooler.

 

Jimmy Blue wrote:

and awkward. Specifically, the dialog windows that
pop "up" for property list editing, instance place,
modal commands in general are prone to "pop under"

I'm finishing transitioning from Solaris/CDE to
RHEL3/KDE3, (with IC5033) and have similar *very*
annoying problems in that environment.

This is all with focus-follows-mouse (doesn't matter
if it's sloppy or strict) and click-to-raise.

1) In CDE, click-to-raise means CLICK ON THE
TITLEBAR/FRAME, PERIOD. You can type in
lowered-but-active window and click on buttons
and menus, and it does not raise. This is
correct behavior.

2) In KDE, click-to-raise means CLICK ANYWHERE IN
THE DAMN WINDOW. This is wrong and bad behavior.
Very nasty when you're reading cellnames or
property values off the top window and trying
to open a new cell in a partially-buried library
browser, or paste values in a partially buried
property window. Gag.

An additional related Linux/Virtuoso annoyance is warning
popups; these normally warp the mouse to themselves (and
then warp the mouse back when OK'ed or canceled. On CDE,
this works great. On KDE, the mouse *looks* warped, but
when you click, the click lands on the original location,
because of 2) the popup gets buried. Yuck. I've trained
myself to do a little shake&bake with the mouse on these
warning popups; this makes the mouse remember where it
really is, I drag the mouse back over to the popup, *then*
dismiss it. I run into this on the Assura "Overwrite
Existing Data?" popup 10 times a day, and it drives me nuts.

I've looked hard and found no configuration change for KDE;
I was going to try Gnome (even though I dislike it) for
a while to see if I had more luck there, but I guess I
needn't bother now!

-Jay-

 

[Suresh Jeevanandam]

Hi,
Check out fvwm95.
http://fvwm95.sourceforge.net/

Regards,
Suresh
Jimmy Blue wrote:

I have just ditched the last of my Sun boxes
and now use Linux machines as my graphics heads.
The window behavior (Sawfish / GNOME) is erratic
and awkward. Specifically, the dialog windows that
pop "up" for property list editing, instance place,
modal commands in general are prone to "pop under"
instead. Then I have to rotate-to-bottom all of the
windows until I find the little bugger. The main
window also seems to raise over the dialog windows
with every select (for example, when I have an open
property-edit window and am serially single-selecting
objects the property edit window keeps going back
under the schematic / layout window whether or not
raise-on-focus is enabled in the Sawfish settings).

So a couple of questions are

1) Is GNOME and/or Sawfish the "right" Linux window
manager? Is there one that Cadence prefers or developed
to?

2) Is there a set of X-window-manager settings that
act more like the Sun-normal behavior with particular
regard to popups / dialogs? Either Cadence-recommended
or personally discovered?

 

Pete nospam Zakel wrote:

In article <1103832249.419761.111740@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com
jayl-news@accelerant.net writes:

However, they both exhibit the "false-mouse-warp" bug,
just the same as KDE.

What do you mean by "false-mouse-warp"?

As I said earlier...

An additional related Linux/Virtuoso annoyance is warning
popups; these normally warp the mouse to themselves (and
then warp the mouse back when OK'ed or canceled. On CDE,
this works great. On KDE, the mouse *looks* warped, but
when you click, the click lands on the original location,

This happens with icfb/assura on every Linux/window manager
combination I've tried.

the cursor. That can be turned off by adding the line:

hiGetCIWindow()->warpPointer = nil

to your .cdsinit file. Personally, I think warping the cursor is
evil...

Properly done, it saves me mouse movement, and that's pretty
much always a good thing (for me).

-Jay-