From: mju@mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us (Marc Unangst)
Subject: Re: SCO X11R4 EFS and MultiScreens
Date: Sat, 15 Aug 1992 06:34:18 GMT
Organization: The Programmer's Pit Stop, Ann Arbor MI

In article <9208131814.aa12064@dlpco.dlpco.COM> lee@dlpco.dlpco.COM (Lee Penn) writes:
>In general, I like the idea of a panning server operating on a 
>much larger virtual screen surface far better than the 
>multiscreen concept.  With this, multiscreen goes away totally.

If you need a panning server, you probably don't have a big enough
screen.  I find that running at 1024x768 works well; you can fit two
80-column xterms horizontally and two 24-line xterms vertically, for a
total of four simultaneously fully-visible 80x24 xterms.  Note that
you may have to play with the Motif border widths to do this; IMHO the
stock widths are much too big for anything resembling real use.  Also,
you'll want to get rid of the stupid icon box, which takes up a lot of
screen space for no apparent purpose.  Setting the keyboard focus
policy to "pointer" instead of "explicit" makes things easier, too,
since you then just have to move the mouse pointer into a window to
give it the keyboard focus.  Since you don't have to click on the
window, you don't have to raise the window, and can thus type in a
partially-obscured window.  Here is my set of X resource settings for
mwm, in case you want a few hints:

Mwm*keyboardFocusPolicy:        pointer
Mwm*focusAutoRaise:             false
Mwm*fadeNormalIcon:             true
Mwm*useIconBox:                 false
Mwm*client*activeBackground:    cyan3
Mwm*client*activeForeground:    black
Mwm*client*activeTopShadowColor: cyan1
Mwm*client*activeBottomShadowColor: black
Mwm*icon*activeBackground:      cyan3
Mwm*icon*activeForeground:      black
Mwm*icon*activeTopShadowColor:  cyan1
Mwm*icon*activeBottomShadowColor: black
Mwm*interactivePlacement:       true
Mwm*resizeBorderWidth:          3
Mwm*showFeedback:               all
Mwm*XTerm*iconImage:            terminal
Mwm*Scoterm*iconImage:          terminal

Also, try adding a line like this to your .startxrc or .xinitrc:

xterm -name root -title root -iconic -exec su &

This will start up an xterm, iconized, with a "su" process running
instead of a normal shell.  Just type in the root password, and you've
got a window running as root.  The -name and -title flags set the
window name to "root", so you can distinguish it from your other
xterms.  I usually keep one of these sitting around on the desktop
ready for use; an icon at the bottom of the screen doesn't take up
that much space.

I've tried running with a bigger virtual root window than my physical
root window, and didn't like it in the least.  At best, you wind up
panning around the screen more than you'd like to, because the
information you want is always just a little bit off the the left, or
up top, or...At worst, a lot of programs accidentally make their
screen bigger than it should be because they assume your display is
bigger than it is.

-- 
Marc Unangst                | Real men don't make backups.  Real men never
mju@mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us   | accidentally delete files that they're going
                            | to need later.
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