[virt-tools-list] [virt-manager][PATCH 0/4] Allow hiding window decorations and menu bar

[Cole Robinson]

On 01/07/2019 07:17 PM, Peter Crowther wrote:
> Cole, can I request that you reconsider how niche this is or isn't? I 
> routinely work in the manner described here. Maybe I'm also just unusual!
> 

I can see how this is a valid usecase for some people. But even if it's 
5% of all users it can still be outside the bounds of virt-manager as I 
see it.

IMO when it comes to graphical console type features, I think 
virt-manager should aim to expose general purpose features and not much 
more. graphical stuff has a world of options that we don't expose: 
various performance/bandwidth things: look at vncviewer --help or 
virt-viewer --help-spice for some examples.

Particularly as well graphical features are a pain to test and can cause 
issues depending on the desktop environment setup, which results in bugs 
that are a pain to reproduce. AKA maintenance burden. I've seen this 
many times. And given that in my limited testing the decorations issue 
didn't work on wayland I assume this feature would be similar

Maybe this is something to bring up WRT to virt-viewer? Like a command 
line option or something. Just a thought

- Cole

> 
> 
> On Mon, 7 Jan 2019, 23:15 Cole Robinson <crobinso at redhat.com 
> <mailto:crobinso at redhat.com> wrote:
> 
>     On 01/01/2019 07:28 PM, Povilas Kanapickas wrote:
>      > The screen estate used by the virt-manager itself in the console
>     mode reduces
>      > the amount of screen estate available to the VM. virt-manager
>     currently supports
>      > the fullscreen option to make maximum use of the available
>     screen. Unfortunately,
>      > this hides the OS taskbar, which makes this approach less usable
>     for workflows
>      > that need to use the taskbar, e.g. when switching between many
>     different VMs at
>      > the same time.
>      >
>      > The PR introduces a "hide decorations" menu option. This option
>     hides the menubar
>      > and the OS window decorations of the VM viewer. Essentially, it's
>     the fullscreen
>      > option without actually going full screen, i.e. the window
>     mechanics are still
>      > preserved and the window can still be hidden, obscured and so on.
>     This mode can
>      > be turned off much like the fullscreen option - my moving mouse
>     near the top edge
>      > which shows the usual two-button box.
>      >
>      > The PR also slightly changes how the "revealer" box works. In
>     non-fullscreen mode
>      > the assumption that it's easy to navigate to the exact top pixel
>     of the window
>      > no longer holds. So the eventbox is now a completely separate
>     rectangle from the
>      > revealer itself and thus can span much wider span of the window
>     and be more than
>      > a single pixel high. This way we don't grab mouse events from
>     much larger area
>      > than we want whenever the box with buttons is shown which would
>     have been an
>      > issue with the previous implementation if I just increased the
>     width of the
>      > eventbox.
>      >
> 
>     Thanks for the patches. It's an interesting idea but the use case seems
>     very niche to have explicit support in virt-manager IMO. Even the idea
>     of hiding window decorations seems quite obscure, not even
>     vncviewer/tigervnc has it AFAICT.
> 
>     Also in my testing it doesn't look to be implemented for gtk on wayland
>     which is kinda the way forward, so we end up with a UI element that
>     is a
>     no-op depending on the desktop config. Maybe that's fixable but I don't
>     know offhand
> 
>     I like the idea of splitting out the overlay logic to its own class
>     though, helps readability, so I pushed patch #1
> 
>     Thanks,
>     Cole
> 
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- Cole