Wayland Still Working On Minimizing, Maximizing

Support for minimize and maximize requests is still being worked on the for the Wayland protocol. Yes, this is to allow windows to be minimized or maximized within the Wayland environment.

Even with Wayland's heavy community-driven development and the significant backing of Intel, Wayland/Weston right now doesn't support minimize/maximize for windows. There's been patches floating around and now they're up to their third revision as of Friday.

Scott Moreau on Thursday published his third revision to the Wayland minimize/maximize protocol.

In order for clients to notify the compositor that they wish to be minimized, a minimize request is needed. This can be used to minimize the surface when a user clicks a minimize button for example.

The compositor needs a way to tell clients to maximize and unmaximize their surfaces. The desktop shell client can ask the compositor to send a surface an (un)maximize event, in response to a panel button for example.

The compositor can minimize and unminimize surfaces but clients can only request that its surface is minimized. The client doesn't need to be involved in a minimize action, unlike (un)maximize, it only needs a way to track its minimize state and request to be minimized. This patch adds minimize and unminimize protocol events for this purpose.

Further, the term minimize is relatively subjective and defined by the implementation. Clients should not expect that minimized means the surface will be invisable to the user. There are several use cases where displaying minimized surfaces will be useful. Clients might want to change input handling or pause when minimized but nothing should change with regards to submitting surface buffer updates.

This work will likely be integrated in time for the next release of Wayland and the reference Weston compositor. This shows how long it takes to design and implement well a full-featured modern display server, with Wayland having been developed for about five years now while Canonical hopes Mir will be ready by later in the year and ready for all form-factors by next April.