How Does Metisse Do this?

[Who]

Does anyone know what kind of input redirection metisse is using to do this

http://insitu.lri.fr/~roussel/videos/metisse/metisse/mandriva/oo-ff.mov

They are interacting with a transformed window...

In fact, metisse has some very cool features, like UI facades and it's implementation of 'spaces' in an OSX style way...

Edit: I Think I have answered my own question - they use xwnc http://forum.beryl-project.org/viewtopic.php?f=51&t=332&hilit=metisse, or so the beryl forums tell me

[Amaranth]

They have their own X server that does input redirection. Same sort of thing Project Looking Glass does. It runs on top of a normal X server, same as XGL.

[baze]

finally something usefull with new technology. this "spaces" stuff which leopard will have too is kind of the first thing in a "next-gen" linux desktop gui that improves usability, imho. ok, apart from the widget plugin + screenlets perhaps.

but the whole "i want to have wobbly animations that look funny and windows that burn on a cube that i can spin because i don't have anything to do atm" is just not improving usability imho, that's why i always switched back to plain xfwm4. unfortunately most of the people working on stuff like compiz, beryl and so on only want those fancy looking stuff, but i still hope some skilled people might even create something usefull with the technology eventually ;)

[FunkyM]

but the whole "i want to have wobbly animations that look funny and windows that burn on a cube that i can spin because i don't have anything to do atm" is just not improving usability imho, that's why i always switched back to plain xfwm4. unfortunately most of the people working on stuff like compiz, beryl and so on only want those fancy looking stuff, but i still hope some skilled people might even create something usefull with the technology eventually ;)

Everything related to input redirection on transformed windows is waiting on the proper Xorg component, but using "compiz-technology" it will be easy to implement once available (giving you all the spaces/interact with windows stuff).

Infact, everything Metisse is able to do can be added by new compiz plugins thus it might make Metisse obsolete at some point in the future.

[racarr]

You don't need input redirection for OSX spaces and as far as I know OSX doesn't have input redirection.

The Wall plugin in Beryl does almost exactly the same thing.

Basically coordinates on the untransformed screen are transformed to the transformed screen through the opengl modelview and projection matrices (and clip coordinates, viewport, other stuff but this is the primary idea).

Wall saves the matrices of the transformed screen and applies the inverse transformation to the cursor coordinates twice, once at the near and once at the far plane. From this you can easily generate a vector that points from the click location to a location within each viewport. Then it is just a matter of comparing these coordinates against window coordinates, selecting a window for drag and drop, and when the mouse is moved transforming the movement so the windows move in a consistent manner.

It's pretty neat really, the viewports can be transformed in arbitrary manners and the drag and drop code 'automatically' works.

[mikedee]

Wall saves the matrices of the transformed screen and applies the inverse transformation to the cursor coordinates twice, once at the near and once at the far plane. From this you can easily generate a vector that points from the click location to a location within each viewport. Then it is just a matter of comparing these coordinates against window coordinates, selecting a window for drag and drop, and when the mouse is moved transforming the movement so the windows move in a consistent manner.

I'm not trying to split hairs here, but isn't what you describe input/event redirection (in a basic form)? :wink:

I think when people speak of input redirection they mean native support in the server. It is possible to add different parts of input redirection into each plugin. The problem is one day you will look at all the plugins and say 'shouldn't we put some of this in the server so it just works'?

Once we have everything working in the server, you will be able to select text and drag and drop it to an exact location whilst in expo mode (hopefully without much/any code in the plugin to support that)

[racarr]

Yes in a basic form but you can't pass events down to non top level windows. You can find the exact coordinates clicked on a window but you have to eat up all the events so the click doesn't 'pass through' so then if you send a fake event at the untransformed coords it gets gobbled up in the same fashion.

I think we all agree input redirection in the server is something nice to have, I was just pointing out that what is featured in OSX spaces can and has been done without input redirection.