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Comment by chrisperkins | Hacker News Reader

> As a ruler. Want to know how big something on your screen is in pixels? Fire up an xlogo, line it up with one edge of the thing, resize until the opposite edge lines up too, and if your window manager puts up a tooltip during window resizing (which I think all the ones I've ever used do), then you know the size.

I don't see a tooltip that shows the window size. I am using Xfce.

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Yeah, I wondered about that too. I remember older, traditional window managers like TWM, FVWM, OpenBOX, etc. show this but most newer "Desktop" environment's window managers like XFCE's and Gnome's do not.

Interestingly when sizing a terminal window these WM's show the size in columns and rows and when sizing a "real" window it shows the size in pixels.

Probably an option somewhere to turn it on in newer environments but it's been a while since I used anything but cwm[1] (which does show the window size on resize) so I can't be sure.

[1] calm window manager - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cwm_%28window_manager%29

Are you using cwm on OpenBSD or on something else? (Just curious.)

OpenBSD is where I discovered it and started using it. First on a laptop that I use to install Beta's and then a few machines at home.

I use a Slackware box at work and was delighted when I found a Linux port[1], now I use it everywhere except on Windows.

[1] https://github.com/zenlinux/cwm

> Interestingly when sizing a terminal window these WM's show the size in columns and rows and when sizing a "real" window it shows the size in pixels.

IIRC there's a window property the app can set on itself to tell the WM of its "resize increment", as well as a "base size". Since the main use case for that is terminal windows (anything that displays fixed-width text), I think most WMs assume that anything with that set on it cares about rows and columns rather than pixels.

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