[Rd] [Solved] Possible x11 window manager window aggregation under one icon?

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 25/03/2021 9:18 a.m., Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
> 
> On 24 March 2021 at 10:30, Martin Maechler wrote:
> | For this reason I've committed to R (the trunk, i.e., R-devel,
> | for R 4.1.0 in a month or so)  in svn rev 80110.
> 
> I just saw that via the (still extremely helpful) RSS feed of SVN changes and
> then pulled.
> 
> You may have missed that Ivan concluded, and I followed, that the _patch is
> not needed_.  All one needs is to adjust the .desktop file. I posted my full
> changelog from the Debian package (of which I currently run a test build on
> two Ubuntu machines using the binaries from Launchpad I pointed to).
> 
> So in that sense I think r80110 may wants to be reverted.
> 

I'm not sure either if Martin saw your conclusion.

I haven't tested R-devel with r80110 yet, but I did make the equivalent 
change in rgl, and have been working with that.

In Ubuntu, it makes no difference if the .desktop file is changed as you 
describe, but I think it's an improvement if you don't make that change 
for the usual case.  You don't get a ton of icons, you get one rgl icon 
per process.

In macOS, it does affect the behaviour of windows.  During rgl testing, 
I sometimes create 100+ windows.  Before the change, the window manager 
put them all over the screen, trying to make the newest one visible. 
After the change (now it knows they're all in the same group), it just 
cascades them down the screen until it hits the bottom, then keeps 
creating tiny windows crammed against the bottom of the screen.  I think 
this is negative (the usual reason I create them all is to hope to spot 
bad changes).

So for a reasonable number of windows the change is an improvement:  the 
windows appear grouped.  For a very large number of windows it's a negative.

Duncan Murdoch