| Abstract |
The imaging model of most window managers reflects the compositing paradigm. Unlike earlier window managers that rendered directly to the screen, the compositing window managers rely on the drawing of the managed windows to off-screen buffers. Then, the window managers compose the window buffers to render the final image.
In this thesis, a nested approach is proposed, in which a window manager can be located inside a window. This approach enables the concurrent presence of multiple nested window managers. Additionally, the managed windows can be located anywhere in the window hierarchy and composed differently from the managed windows placed inside another window manager. To achieve the nesting, a special window, called gate, is introduced that contains a window manager instance and can be embedded to any window container. Similarly to the managed windows, the gate windows are drawn to an off-screen buffer.
In addition, the functionality of the window managers is extended along two different axes. Firstly, the compositing process is transformed to a rendering pipeline, where the window managers render to the gate’s off-screen buffer, instead of the screen. The window manager can render the window buffers either to a 2d or a 3d scene and decorate the managed windows accordingly. Secondly, to facilitate input interaction in diverse geometries, a cascaded pointing translation process is implemented, enabling translation of mouse coordinates across nested window managers with different window compositions. For the purpose of this paper, a custom widget toolkit was implemented, named sprint that supports window manager embedding and provides two distinct managers, a 2d desktop and a custom 3d book.
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Nested compositing window managers
