Always On Bottom

[Jack251970]

I like this project very much and I have used this to build my own WinUI3 app which runs so smoothly. ❤ But I'm looking forward to the function of always on bottom, which can enable me to easily implement windows desktop widgtes.

[dotMorten]

How do you see this working in a multi-monitor setup? (I have two monitors under my primary monitor for instance - all have task bars)

[Jack251970]

Maybe I will only show those windows in the primary monitor. After all, you will always connect the primary monitor. And this action makes those widgets easy to manage their positions. I've used two monitors, and I've used one app that can create widgets. I've found that if I create widgets on a non-primary display, they will automatically appear on the primary display (perhaps in a random location) if the next time it is not connected. 🤔

[dotMorten]

This feels very special case. All the apis to do this are already available (get screen layout and position windows) but of course requires a little custom logic putting it together. I'm going to close this as out of scope for winuiex since I can't see a lot of apps needing helpers for this.

[Jack251970]

You seem to be misunderstanding what I mean, the features I need have nothing to do with window location or screen layout. 🤔

I just need a feature like always-on top, which makes the window always at the bottom (any newly opened windows will always on top of it). 😅

[dotMorten]

Ooooooh. Yeah I misunderstood. I don't think Windows has such a feature does it? If you can find the win32 API for this I'll be happy to expose it

[Jack251970]

I've tried looking for relevant information, but I can't seem to find a solution of C#. Maybe it would be possible to build the desktop as the parent window of this window? I have relatively little experience, so I'd like to have encapsulated functionality. What I can make sure is that this feature should be achievable, the open source project Rainmeter is based on the C language, and the windows it creates are indeed located at the bottom of the screen.

[dotMorten]

That's supposedly the way to go but also heavily recommended against: https://stackoverflow.com/q/365094

That thread have other ideas - all using methods winuiex mostly provide like accessing the windows messages and overriding methods. I still think my original assessment that this is too special a case to put in a generic api. You'll have to do this in your app - some of the apis in winuiex makes this a lot easier but you'll need to do the last mile in your own app.

[Jack251970]

Thanks for your answer! It seems harder than initially thought. 🤔