(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

I regularly use an app that calls up a rather large dialog box. For whatever reason, this box sometimes becomes too large to see bottom buttons, and so it has to be resized. This resizing usually involved dragging the title bar down. If I drag it too far down, the dialog disappears to...I don't know where. Had I dragged it sideways it might have transferred to the adjacent desktop. But if I drag it too far down, it disappears, and cannot be located or recovered. (The dialog box is not behind active windows.) Furthermore, the page from which the dialog was called is totally inoperable, and the only solution is to reboot the computer. Where exactly does this dialog box go to, and how can I get it back?

hi nubc

if the dialogue window still appears in the taskbar you can right click on it there and choose maximize

The dialog box is not represented on the taskbar, nor has it receded behind active windows. If there were a desktop below the current desktop, it has passed to that desktop, but of course, there is no desktop below, only the one beside it, such as desktop 2. (It's not on desktop 2.)

The same thing happens to me in Slacko 5.4. The program is still shown in the taskbar, or tray or whatever that area at the bottom of the screen is called, but won't maximize or even appear on the desktop when I click on it in the taskbar. I have to close the program (by right-clicking on it in the taskbar and choosing close), then restart it.

Can you not click on the program in the task bar, hold the button down and drag the program up until you see the bottom of the dialog box on the desktop?

There is a way with the keyboard as well but I never remember it!

Menu -> Shutdown -> Restart JWM

That's assuming, of course, that you are using JWM.

If you drag a title bar to the bottom of the screen, the title bar will be hidden by the tray. If you were to keep moving it so that your mouse pointer goes off of the bottom of the screen, the mouse pointer and the whole window would reappear at the top. But if you drop the title bar before your mouse pointer passes the bottom screen edge, the title bar will simply sit there behind the tray where you can neither access it nor see it.

The same thing will happen if you drag the title bar up so that your mouse pointer goes off the top of the screen. At that point the title bar is behind the tray, and if you keep moving your mouse up, you can position it above the tray. But if you drop it immediately after your pointer goes off of the top edge of the screen, it will be left sitting behind the tray.

When JWM is restarted, it relocates any window that hangs off of the bottom or right edge of the screen.

This behavior can be tested by opening a new instance of geany and clicking the Open button to open a dialog box that you can experiment with.

nubc wrote:For whatever reason, this box sometimes becomes too large to see bottom buttons, and so it has to be resized.

If you only need to get at the bottom buttons, in some cases you can do so by clicking the maximize button on the title bar. Much of the content will still hang off the bottom of the screen, but -- at least in some cases -- the bottom buttons will be visible.

First off, I did not drag the dialog box off the desktop, only a portion of it, and then it vanished. Sometimes I have to move the dialog box, down or aside, to read something in order to properly fill out the dialog. The normal way to restore the dialog box, once it has receded behind other windows, is to click the page it was on as represented on the task bar. However, after the dialog box has moved off the page, the page itself becomes inoperable, and I cannot restore the page/dialog from the taskbar, nor close it there with a right click. I might be able to kill the dialog as a process, but I'd rather not.

nubc wrote:I did not drag the dialog box off the desktop, only a portion of it, and then it vanished.

Yes. That can happen, for instance, when you drag the title bar up so that you can see more of the lower areas of the dialog box. If you drag the title bar just slightly beyond the top of your screen -- just far enough that your mouse pointer disappears from the top of the screen -- then release the mouse button, the dialog box will vanish.

When you try doing that with geany's Open File dialog box, does it behave for you as I've described it? Is this similar to what happens with your other dialog box?

If not, you could still try restarting JWM when your dialog box vanishes to see if that brings it back. (Yes, it seems like a major step to solve a small problem, but it beats rebooting).

Have you tried F11? Full screen? Just a thought.

nubc,

Since you are running Wary 5.1.1 I assume you are using JWM. On my Wary 5.3 desktop, I reproduced this scenario by opening Geany and then selecting the "Open" dialog box. Then again, I reproduced this scenario by opening mtPaint and then selecting "New Channel" dialog box. In each test, I deliberately dragged the dialog box off the screen below the bottom tray.

I was able to restore the disappearing dialog box in two ways: using the solution by npierce to simply: Restart JWM, or by right-clicking on Desktop #1 on the tray I moved the application up with the "movement pointer" (a four directions arrow cursor) which allowed me to see the edge of the missing dialog box so that I was able to right-click that and drag it into view.

It turns out that restarting Joe's Window Manager is by far the easiest solution. While my solution works, it is tricky because the mouse pointer must be placed exactly on the barely visible edge of the dialog box within Desktop #1 space so that the cursor changes to the "movement pointer" with the right-click. Only then will you be able to drag the dialog box up and into view. Sometimes this approach took me a few moments.

Monsie

Transient windows (dialogue boxes from a parent, for this instance) are a pitb sometimes - notably when they go astray or otherwise (like with sloppy focus or autoraise..). Usually they're not shown in a tasklist and as noted the parent is 'frozen' until the transient is released or the parent closed (mrrr). Reload of jwm is simple and shouldº bring the transient back into view.

Another way to avoid having the blessed thing 'disappear' is to move it by (Alt/Ctrl)+drag anywhere in the window (so you're not dependent on using a bar-drag to move the window as most habitually do ). If the transient shows in jwm's pager, a r-click drag is yet another way to move it there (in the pager - one of the reasons I like a custom oversized pager in its own autohide tray on the side). Speaking of (jwm's pager), maybe consider a different layout for your virtual desks (2x2 or whatever columns/rows work for you). Possibly adjust the 'snap' in your jwmrc-personal to a different value may help as well .

, jwm's pretty versatile - simply a matter of tuning it to your prefs (like any wm)

º - or not .. moving a window can take it off the visible screen (especially true in some newer pups that might have an issue displaying the full screen edge-to-edge, 'slivers' of a pixel or two sometimes don't show )

@ICPUG - yah, use borderless windows enough (like I do with xpad notes and some terms) and the modifier/keycombos become habit .. even then, sometimes I'm surprised on occasion if I haven't done due diligence with the wm kybd prefs and so on