Re: [9front] [PATCH] rio: resize border and scrollbar based on font

[Stanley Lieber <sl@stanleylieber.com>]

On May 10, 2024 9:27:50 AM EDT, Kristo <kristo.ilmari@gmail.com> wrote:
>On 10.5.2024 9.13, Romano wrote:
>> I also can't imagine trying to go through all programs to see which
>> rely on a specific rio border-width.
>
>Rio was probably the first 9 program that I ever hacked on and I do recall
>that modifying the border size did unfortunately mess up some programs. If
>I had to guess now I'd say it was mothra. A lot of code has changed since
>then though, sorry I don't have a machine to test with at the moment.
>
>Kristo
>

mycroftiv's grio has border widths implemented as command flags. i remember seeing some weird behavior around the edges of some programs when i used it to diddle those values.

if existing programs rely on bad assumptions, it's worth adjusting them to remove the bad assumptions. sometimes you just have to do this, even though it can be a lot of tedious work.

that's why it's also worth figuring out where the best place to cut is. one of plan 9's strong suits has always been careful choices about what to omit, with various small pieces thoughtfully interacting to maximum effect, sometimes going too far, and sometimes not going far enough. the important thing is to think before cutting.

my experience with general scaling is that it seems nice when the physical screen geometry and the desired resolution don't result in a fuzzy mess, but this doesn't happen very often. specifying border size alone on the command line doesn't address all the other bibs and bobs like menus and scrollbars (fortunately,  rio isn't overly ornate). and of course, many programs manage their own unique scrollbars, menus, fonts, etc., usually hardcoded.

i can't help but admire the choice of cuts in sigrid's /dev/theme. if gui programs were modified to honor this convention, they wouldn't need to be altered again in the future. and a theme file seems like a good place to get specific about border sizes, etc. for example, the stuff phil9 has been woking on (mongrel, vdir, etc.) already honor /dev/theme.

alternately, maybe we need some kind of heuristic based on screen resolution? this would probably not make everybody happy, either, but might get us close enough to subjective visual consistency to call the game.

sl