Reading the Preview

Documentation / Contents - Dock Area

• Overview of Desktop Breathing Space
  • What the Zone Is For
  • The Controls
• Choosing an Edge
• Setting the Size
  • The Fifty Percent Limit
• Reading the Preview
  • The Hazard Stripes
  • The Five Windows
• Applying the Change
• When the Toolchest Owns the Zone
• From the Command Line
• Where the Settings Live
• Copyright Information

Reading the Preview

The sunken well in the middle of the window, captioned "Five windows, Fair tiling:", is a diagram of your screen. It is drawn in your screen's own proportions, so the shapes in it mean something.

Three things are drawn:

• the plain desktop, as the background
• the reserved band, in hazard stripes
• five windows, tiled in the space that is left

The Hazard Stripes

The reserved band is filled with diagonal stripes over a dark wash, the striped-tape idiom that means claimed, under-construction territory. It is drawn that way rather than as a plain coloured rectangle because a plain rectangle reads as another window, and this band is the opposite of a window: it is the space nothing may take.

The stripes take their colours from your colour scheme, so the tape recolours when the scheme does. Nothing here is a fixed colour value.

The stripes are drawn in this preview only. Nothing is ever painted on your real desktop.

The Five Windows

Five windows are laid out in the space that is left, in Fair tiling mode. Five, because that is enough to show the mode's shape without turning the diagram into a grid of slivers.

They are solid blocks with a hairline outline and a one-pixel title line, not thumbnails of your real windows and not pictures of anything. The preview is a diagram of proportions. It stays honest at any size and it costs nothing to draw on old hardware.

The layout is not a reimplementation. The preview calls the window manager's own tiling code, so the arrangement you see is produced by exactly the routine that will lay out the real windows. A preview that drifts from the window manager is worse than no preview at all.

The spacing between the blocks is your real window gap, scaled with everything else, so the picture shows the desktop you actually have rather than a gapless mosaic nobody runs.

What Is Not Drawn

Icons, the Toolchest and your actual windows are not in the preview. It shows the geometry, not the contents. If you are reserving space for something specific, measure it against the band's proportion rather than looking for it in the picture.

See Setting the Size for the wheel that moves the band.