From: blk@vanity.mitre.org (Brian L. Kahn)
Subject: Drop menus, scrollbars .shar file
Date: Tue, 19 May 92 12:58:56 EDT

 These WOOL and elisp files implement a flexible and useful approach
to drop down menus and scrollbars for epoch under GWM.  This README
file is not adequate documentation, but unfortunately this is all you
get.  If things don't work, try looking through the code.

 These are the files included:
 drop-menus.gwm	- definition of some drop down menus
 style.gwm     	- example of a drop-menus bar in a style
 widgets.gwm   	- all the code implementing drop-menus and scrollbars
 widgets.el    	- the epoch code that interprets events from GWM

 The files should be loaded in this order:  widgets, drop-menus, style.



HOW IT LOOKS
------------
 The drop-menus are part of a window decoration style.  Normally an
Xwindow class or program name will have the same decoration, altho you
can fiddle with that.  Style.gwm shows how to select the decoration
based on any old characteristic you wish.  I used that to give a
different decoration to epoch windows I refered to as popups, little
information type windows not meant for editing.  Simple usage gives
the same decoration to all your epoch windows except the minibuffer.

 The drop-down menus are collected into a menubar, a bar with bunch of
little buttons in them which drop down menus.  A quick click/release
selects the first thing on the menu.

 I suggest putting this bar on top, because the code does drop-down
menus.  If you don't like sacrificing your title bar, try changing the
code to make jump-up menus and put it at the bottom!

The scrollbar doesn't have any slider.  A slider seems to be a lot of
effort for little payoff.  The scrollbar doesn't visually split when
the epoch screens split, but epoch interprets events on a per-window
basis.  This lets you scroll the other window very easily, a big
advantage.
     


HOW IT WORKS
------------
 The WOOL code communicates with epoch by setting the properties
"Dmenu" or "scrollbar" when events occur.  Pushing a couple of
property handlers grabs the messages and deals with them.  The Dmenu
handler just takes the message as a string and executes it.  The
scrollbar handler takes different actions for each of the three
buttons, easily changed by the scrollbar-funcs constant:

  (defconst widget:scrollbar-funcs
    '((1 . scroll-up) (2 . line-up-point) (3 . scroll-down)))

 If the epoch screen is split into several windows, the scrollbar
handler figures out which window is next to the scrollbar and acts on
that window.  The information sent to epoch by GWM tells how far down
the scrollbar (in percent, 0-100) the mouse click was, so proportional
scrolling through the file should be easy to do.



POSSIBLE PROBLEMS 
----------------- 
 When the cursor is on a button, the font changes to bold - a nice
effect assuming you have the right fonts.  Note that the fonts I used
have the same width in regular or bold, so the buttons don't shift to
the right when I bold one of them.  I think these fonts are part of
the standard X distribution.

 I last used this a long time ago, under earlier versions of GWM and
epoch.  Some around here are still using this stuff, but I can't vouch
for compatability.  Also, I pulled this out as a piece from my larger
set of personal preferences in GWM.  I may have forgotten some little
support function.




COPYRIGHT
---------
 As it says in each file, use as you like but don't try to sell it.
Like anyone would pay for this, right?  This does not prevent you from
including this along with something you *are* selling, as long as the