[Openmcl-devel] window size & position

[Gary Byers]

We've been using the builtin Cocoa facilities for keeping track of
window size and position across sessions in the trunk version of the
IDE for a few weeks now.  That's not quite the same as saving and
restoring the whole state of the world between sessions, but it does
mean that named editor documents and listeners open with the size
and position that they had when they were last closed.

There aren't too many things that can go wrong there.  Cocoa just
writes the window's bounds rectangle and the screen's to the
preferences file, and I assume that if you change monitors or screen
resolutions between sessions it'll try to do something reasonable to
adjust to that.  (I haven't tried this, and don't know how reasonable
its behavior is.)  Someone has said (somewhere) that if a saved
window's height is exactly the same as the screen height it's restored
to slightly smaller dimensions; if that's true, I don't know why or
what should be done about it, but I'm willing to say that the scheme
works out-of-the-box in 99% of all cases, AFAIK.

Nothing in that scheme knows or cares if the file's contents have
changed between sessions; we're just saying that "/path/to/foo.lisp"
has a certain frame rectangle associated with it, and that whenever
"/path/to/foo.lisp" is opened, it should use the size and position
specified by that rectangle.

Some of the other things that people say they want are more sensitive
to whether or not the file's externally modified (by a source code
control system, by editing it in emacs, ...) between sessions.  (For
instance, keeping track of the selection in some externalizable format -
integers representing offset and length - would be Really Neat if the
file isn't externally modified between sessions and could be Really
Stupid if such an external modification occurred and was undetected.

Those aren't necessarily insurmountable problems, but I'm not sure
whether it's desirable for an editor to act like it's the only thing
that could modify a text file and to treat violations of that
assumption as being exceptional in some way; that doesn't seem to
have much to do with the real world.

On Thu, 28 May 2009, Janusz Podrazik wrote:

> is there any possibility to add to the preferences the functionality
> which is indicated but not implemented.
> i am talking about the size, position and memory of all windows,
> dialog boxes etc...
> i think would be very desirable to open CCL and see all the editors
> open were you left the CCL last.
> the 'Quit' by default should store all the information - with out
> extra 'snapshot' functionality.
> it is very time consuming and frustrating to live with out this functionality.
>
> any time soon?
>
> janusz podrazik
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