Override redirect type of root Window (force floating, force geometry)?

[Animeshz]

Applications like rofi / dmenu / launcy / alfred / wox, etc uses something called as override-redirect to make them appear at the middle (or some specific location) on the screen bypassing the interference of the window-manager and other utilities.

^{(PS: We can also start rofi as normal window with rofi -normal-window to see the difference)}

It allows them to draw custom popup menu anywhere on the screen, including on tiling window managers, on their own decision.

It is very useful for applications including:

• App Launchers
• File Searchers
• Quick Workspace Navigation
• Clipboard Management
• Quick Calculator
• Quick Access to Song Selector / Controller (as popup), etc.

Is there support for this in slint already, or can there be support for this? I would like to make a few applications on this purpose, and finding it difficult to find a good fit framework instead of going system-specific library for each platform...

I'm open for any discussion!

[Animeshz]

e.g. For x11, implementation in dmenu

[tronical]

I think that's a very reasonable request. I can think of two ways of fitting this in:

1. You run your own event loop, create the window with winit and use low-level winit API to configure the window. The downside is that this requires also using low-level Slint platform API and at the moment only the Software Renderer is available for use here. We're working on splitting out the Skia and FemtoVG renderers (in #2142) into separate crates, but they don't have public API yet.

2. We expose the raw window handle (as per #877) and then you configure window attributes after creation.

I think 2. is the cleaner approach in a way, but it's not ready yet. 1. is more flexible in the long run, but requires the use of private API at the moment :(

What do you think?

[tronical]

In https://github.com/slint-ui/slint/pull/2617 we added a third way: provide access to the winit window.

[ogoffart]

I discussed with @tronical and we thought that this is an exotic API and it can only be done using the internal API and using winit API.