In Qt, there is an option to use either native windows for individual widgets or "alien" windows, in which only the top level widget is a native window - https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qwidget.html#native-widgets-vs-alien-....
The non-client area included stuff like the title bar, min/max/close buttons and system menu icon, and resizing borders.
The client area was where your app would put its content, including any child windows like buttons and list boxes.
Many of the window messages for the client area had corresponding non-client messages, for example WM_PAINT and WM_NCPAINT. All of these messages would arrive in your GetMessage/DispatchMessage loop, but you would generally ignore the WM_NC versions and DispatchMessage would send them to the Windows code for default processing.
OS/2 Presentation Manager took a more elegant approach here (but probably slower). You had one main window and everything inside it - both "client" and "non-client" stuff - was child windows.
So you just had one set of messages for everything, no WM_NCxxxx messages at all. The client area was a child window, with other child windows for the non-client doodads.
On GNOME, if the application gets stuck you have to kill it by other means.
Windows is kinda smalltalk-like in its window message system.
The feature is from Windows Vista and it is still the basis of acyrilic effects on 11. The feature is explained in this page: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/dwm/customfr...
[1]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050211-00/?p=36...
[2]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050315-00/?p=36...
BTW, the current Windows Task Manager still shows the total HANDLE count on the CPU page.
They were not used in apps with complex UIs because native controls were hard to skin and didn't work very well when their size was very small (as complex UIs tend to need)
That depends on the overhead per window. Microsoft Windows could use nested windows because it had separate Graphics objects to store such things as the current drawing pen, its position and the current font to use for drawing (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/gdiplusg...)
In comparison, on the classic Mac every window had a GrafPort that defined a boundary region, a clipping region, the current pen position, size, drawing pattern, etc.
The Mac could have such heavy-weight window objects because it didn’t nest windows. Instead, each window had a single list of controls that were much lighter-weight.
my gut feeling says separating the drawing state from windows as in MS Windows is the better choice, but I also think having separate entities called “windows” and “controls” as on the Mac is the better choice.
(its documentation is ‘less than stellar’, but it appears GrafPort still exists: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/applicationservice...)
GrafPort is part of QuickDraw, almost all of which was removed in 64-bit macOS. (A handful of QuickDraw functions survive, but they can't actually be used to do drawing, just to manipulate Point/Region/etc data structures.)
From what I understand, this struct/typedef remains in the headers to help with compiling legacy code–but all the APIs which take it as an argument have been removed, so it is essentially a useless vestige.
I like to sum up the difference between Mac and Windows thusly. Probably glossing over a bunch of stuff but still:
* Steve Jobs toured Xerox and came away with an idea, and a fairly shallow one -- the windowed, mouse-driven, document-centric interface. This is what he then had his team implement in the Lisa and Mac. As implementations go, it was really good and it looked good, but it was really procedural Pascal code beneath. (You had to handle window moving and resizing yourself in early Mac OS. There were library functions to help, but you had to code all that into your application's main loop.)
* Microsoft, at right about the same time, was hiring guys out of Xerox PARC itself -- guys like Charles Simonyi -- and they brought with them a whole passel of ideas, not just concerning interfaces but also software design, things like objects and message-passing. That's why Windows could do things like handle the move and resize drag actions, and then just post WM_MOVE or WM_RESIZE to the target window. Windows were objects -- members of classes, even, and could receive messages.
Granted, Windows couldn't run in 128K -- and Jobs would pivot completely with NeXT and deliver an object-oriented desktop based on Smalltalk grafted onto C (Objective-C), but initially it seems Apple were trying to build a cheaper, more user friendly Xerox Star and Microsoft were trying to get as much of the Smalltalk environment as would fit in a PC without requiring devs to learn a new language.
I had three or four people who kept bugging me that I ought to get my rear over to Xerox PARC and see what they were doing. And so I finally did. I went over there. And they were very kind and they showed me what they were working on. And they showed me really three things, but I was so blinded by the first one that I didn’t even really see the other two. One of the things they showed me was object-oriented programming. They showed me that, but I didn’t even see that. The other one they showed me was really a network computer system. They had over a hundred Alto computers, all network using email, et cetera, et cetera. I didn’t even see that.
I was so blinded by the first thing they showed me, which was the graphical user interface. I thought it was the best thing I’d ever seen in my life.
One way to describe NeXT is Steve returning to the two things he missed @ Xerox.
On the point of GrafPort still existing – Carbon was insanely backwards source compatible until QuickDraw was deprecated in the transition to 64-bit! [1] Conservatively-written 80s Toolbox code would work with some switching around of headers, and shimming getting/setting members of structs with functions.
[1] https://www.highcaffeinecontent.com/blog/20150124-MPW,-Carbo...
I think that’s more either because they yet had to be invented or because giving up 16 or so pixels on a screen (the menu bar was 20 pixels high, IIRC) that’s only 342 pixels high wasn’t desirable.
> A few early applications just assumed 512x342 fullscreen (i.e. MacPaint.)
I think MacPaint can be forgiven for that. It was a miracle that it ran on a Mac with 128kB RAM.
An application on that machine had about 28kB free for a program. MacPaint allowed you to edit a 50kB bitmap, double-buffering the screen to avoid flicker, with full undo.
(And yes, paging to floppy disk isn’t fast. It did work, though)
For a while there, at least on Windows 3.1 and before, possibly some Windows 9x versions -- you had a GDI heap and USER heap of 64k each (one 16-bit x86 segment). If you allocated too many HANDLEs, you could blow one of these heaps. So it still made sense to be judicious about how many windows you created. Most Web browsers and word processors, for instance, drew their documents in the client area and did not use subwindows to position text elements.
IIRC this limit never applied to the NT family (NT, 2000, XP, …).
--
[1] I can't remember if this was resolved at all in the 98 releases, I imagine not
Also they were global so apps could communicate - the message queue was based on sending things to window handles, and the more advanced IPC methods like DDE and so forth were built on that. It is also how anything that interested with the task list or interacted with the desktop (adding decorations to windows etc.) functioned. This doesn't work if local handles can conflict with those in the other app.
The amount of things that depended on HWNDs working this way is probably a significant part of why large chunks of GDI remained 16-bit in Windows95 despite things like the limit of 16,384 handles being an issue you could run into relatively easily by that point - too many existing apps & tools would have broken otherwise and limited people's desire to upgrade from 3.x.
So a combination of "no point introducing extra complexity, at least early on", "the global pool is actually useful", and "once it was done that way, it was very hard to refactor without breaking compatibility with much of the existing application base".
I think the compatibility layers on later versions did start separating the apps more, once breaking things was less of an issue (new versions existed that were directly compatible with newer APIs) so segregating the apps for stability reasons won out over being quite as backward compatible.
Every time I’m forced to use Windows I’m blow away by the clownishness of every application deciding to skin its own custom windowing controls.
This started happening some time around XP, I think?
If applications used the theme APIs, they'd run fine on both beta and production versions of Windows. If applications tried to render bitmaps over title bars and such, they'd look weirdly out of place, because the real theme was extremely different.
Unless you preferred the beta Windows XP style, of course, which some people did. I think there were a few hacks you could do to get the beta theme working on release versions of Windows.
That certainly did not work, as billions of applications, including big ones, were using third party “XP-like” and “XP with some twist” skins both in Windows 9X and XP builds.
Microsoft very likely wanted to have some control over commercial skinning market (and make people making those broken things care about compatibility) — alternative themes were supposed to be available to users after being signed by Microsoft. However, you can count the number of those themes on one hand, because others' response was “providing a patched version of uxtheme.dll for each update”.
The other problem was that fashionable XP interface features like colourful side panels in Explorer and Control Panel were windowless controls made with internal layout engine, and neither was available to the public. So the only option was to re-implement those things more or less faithfully, which was done by many developers of commercial UI libraries.
I'm not sure if they wanted to sell themes, really, all theming I've ever seen them sell was based on Windows Media Player and I don't think they did a lot of business in that. Most of the themes were free and the ones that cost money often came back for free a while down the line.
The explorer panels didn't seem to catch on outside of Windows Explorer. Most apps that implemented the bar also didn't seem to make good use of it, in my opinion. Microsoft Office had it, but it always made the screen feel a bit crowded in the way they stacked it with controls and panels, while being completely empty at other times. I think the panel made sense for explorer, but not much elsewhere.
I do wonder if there was an API for the side bar if you used the CLSID explorer interface.
I think Microsoft should've exposed the control, but at least they released a lot more native controls when Vista came around.
However, after the release of XP developers did not stick to using correct native components that would automatically look like Windows 98 on Windows 98, and like Windows XP on Windows XP. They continued to reinvent everything via third-party skinning libraries, but now with kind-of-hip kind-of-XP styles. Random example:
http://web.archive.org/web/20041213230620/http://www.helium2...
Native menus don't work like that. The gradient between “Standard theme” and “Silver theme” background colors is someone's invention. Scrollbars should reach the top of the table views, and their native headers look different. Extra shadows here and there. etc., etc. Everything is improperly remade.
I suppose it was an important topic if they specifically introduced visual style signing at the time when system files and drivers were not even required to be signed. Maybe the perspective of new antitrust trials botched another EEE campaign, maybe the peasants just refused to bow to the king that time.
As for undocumented framework, look up "Windows DirectUser Engine" and "DirectUIHWND". Here's someone fighting with Raymond Chen in comments over IE pretending that having a copy of undocumented system library does not consist of using undocumented Windows APIs:
http://web.archive.org/web/20080329044328/http://blogs.msdn....
The name “DirectUI” is spilled in other comments:
http://bytepointer.com/resources/old_new_thing/20050211_035_...
Side note: as bytepointer archive is badly indexed for this or that reason, I've wasted more than an hour trying to find the post I vaguely remembered seeing. A single mention of "duser.dll" on HackerNews has finally helped me:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7811284
P.S. Nice contemporary controls re-implementing those Explorer panels from scratch (and copying the name):
https://www.codeproject.com/articles/3216/directui-window-as...
http://web.archive.org/web/20061112210203/http://blogs.msdn....
https://www.google.com/search?q=Kai%27s+powertools+screensho...
I even vaguely recall MS jumping on this bandwagon with some MFC styles.
That, and Delphi applications not having a minimize to tray animation due to the application window technically being invisible.
> There was a fad for putting icons on dialog buttons. That was the most obvious Borland stylistic trait. Big green check mark on "OK" etc.
This I remember well. It was a hallmark.
> That, and Delphi applications not having a minimize to tray animation due to the application window technically being invisible.
Say what now?!
The application's window message queue was used for things like coordinating background thread actions with the UI thread and other general purpose stuff - I don't remember the details and it's been a long time since I read the VCL source.
What you want to do instead is to use custom drawing and event handling code for those list items. The it will be very snappy.
In older programs this menu is still around and you can still use it to close programs, like you did in Windows 3.1 days. Even doubleclicking the icon in the top left corner still works to close those programs.
It's alt+SPACE. Very handy if you manage to get a window off screen, you that menu almost always shows up on screen, and you can select Move (possibly by hitting m), and then move (or drag) your mouse and the window comes back.
Maybe, but I just tried it and it seems to open some type of search.
> Very handy if you manage to get a window off screen, you that menu almost always shows up on screen, and you can select Move (possibly by hitting m), and then move (or drag) your mouse and the window comes back.
I used to use it exactly for this, but it seems like they fixed something in the past 10 years, because that does no longer happen for me. I think the last time it happened was in the Windows 7 days. That's probably also why I forgot the shortcut.
I still use the double click in the top left corner to close windows, but they kill that for more and more programs. For some time it still worked for some programs with reduced chrome, like tabbed browsers, when I clicked on a few of the blank pixels in the top left corner.
> Maybe, but I just tried it and it seems to open some type of search.
That's because you installed PowerToys, and the PowerToys Run module takes over the Alt+Space key combo.
This really pissed me off the first time I wanted to use Alt+Space to rescue an offscreen window and I had no idea what this search box was.
It's a real problem with the kids who maintain Windows today and the "modern" Windows apps. They just don't know, and don't care, what the classical keyboard shortcuts are and how important they can be.
Here is one example of a GitHub issue that was closed as "wontfix":
https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/issues/13860
You can fix this by changing the "activation shortcut" for Run in the PowerToys Settings, or by disabling PowerToys Run entirely.
I changed it to Win+Alt+Space and now Alt+Space works like it always has.
Also, 'toast0' left out an important step in their description. You need to press Alt+Space, then M, and then any cursor key, and finally you can use the mouse to move the window.
These days (since Windows Vista, hah) the easiest way to rescue an offscreen window is Win+Arrow (the "Aero Snap" keys). (It's also the easiest way to do most of the other old control menu things: Win+Up is Maximize/Restore and Win+Down is Minimize/Restore. The two lacking things are Move when you actually intend to keyboard move and Size for keyboard resizing, though both are less usual at modern resolutions than they used to be.)
If someone has installed PowerToys the likelihood they are using FancyZones increases and so too the likelihood they already use Win+Arrow shortcuts heavily (especially if they let FancyZones take over them for zones).
> Also, 'toast0' left out an important step in their description. You need to press Alt+Space, then M, and then any cursor key, and finally you can use the mouse to move the window.
You need to push a cursor key because Move was originally intended as an accessibility feature when you couldn't Move a window with the mouse (or needed more precision than your mouse supported) and needed to use the keyboard arrows. Also why Size exists in that old menu. If you want to talk about knowing the history of classical keyboard shortcuts, the use of that menu for keyboard accessibility to things instead of the mouse is an important part of why that menu existed in the first place (and part of why it feels so vestigial today because mice have improved so much since the early days of Windows and screen resolutions have grown so much since the early days of Windows that trying to precisely to-the-pixel move or resize windows with the keyboard today seems silly).
I would say less accessibility, and more the mouse was optional with Windows before 95, so all features needed to be keyboard friendly. I think they became 'required' by spec in 95, but you could still do everything with a keyboard. Mousekeys was included in Win95 and is more of an accessibility feature.
I've recently discovered that GNOME switches between fast and precise keyboard dragging with Ctrl, and snaps to window edges on Shift. See process_keyboard_move_grab():
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/blob/main/src/compos...
As they say, they had to do it to eliminate flicker.
Which goes to show that if your elegant design can't scale, it will be corrupted until it can. Something something "worse is better"
smalltalk has worked this way since at least 01976, but the word they used instead of 'window' was 'view'. see for example steve burbeck's 01992 'how to use model-view-controller' which is describing smalltalk-80 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/238719652_Applicati...
> Views are designed to be nested. Most windows in fact involve at least two views, one nested inside the other. The outermost view, known as the topView is an instance of StandardSystemView or one of its subClasses. The StandardSystemView manages the familiar label tab of its window. Its associated controller, which is an instance of StandardSystemController, manages the familiar moving, framing, collapsing, and closing operations available for top level windows. Inside a topView are one or more subViews and their associated controllers which manage the control options available in those views. The familiar workspace for example has a StandardSystemView as a topView, and a StringHolderView as its single subView. A subView may, in turn, have additional subViews although this is not required in most applications.
so it's not a peculiarity of x-windows; it's how windows/icon/menu/pointer guis have been built since the beginning. (i'd say 'it's how guis have been built since the beginning' but of course sketchpad, grail, nls/augment, and genesys didn't work this way, and they were certainly graphical user interfaces, even if very different in style.)
Yes of course he did, and you don't have to guess, because the phrase "Windows for example uses" makes Windows a singular noun, compare with "windows for example use". There is no possible ambiguity in the post you replied to.
find a hobby other than harassing me on hn
if you can't control yourself, take a break from hn
(most recent previous incident, though not the only one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39402249)
Yes it does. You think they run that in the same address space? When there are multiple processes with different privilege levels running their UIs? Maybe this comment was accurate for Win3.1, but for a long time there is absolutely a client server architecture behind it.
Anyway one of my favorite uses of HWND is to use a non visible window as a worker thread mechanism. Each HWND is tied to a message pump in the thread that owns it. So you can send it messages, and boom, you have a thread API...
This is why misbehaving application could get you the famous "trailing window" effect where moving a window would leave partly painted trace of it behind - you had to wait for some other coffee to properly repaint that other area.
With DWM, your GDI windows are backed by memory that at most will be a texture in DirectX, which will be then composited by DWM (equivalent of X11 extensions to capture window drawing into pixmap instead of lowest common denominator implementation of DIX/DDX that would draw immediately to framebuffer)
...features and functionality as X, regretably