awm

axle window manager (abbreviated 'awm') is a kernel system that provides a window manager. awm is not an X variant, and does not support any X API's. awm is largely a front-end for axle's lower-level compositing API and view/window functionality. The Window struct is awm's primitive for an application viewport. A Window is the root view of an application, and may contain many Views. Window, View, and all other UI structs are an abstraction built on ca_layer, which represents a rectangle of raw pixel data.

A ca_layer represents a contiguous array of RGB data, with one byte per color channel per pixel (for a total of 3 bytes per pixel). ca_layer provides an API which does all the heavy lifting of compositing layers together. Additionally, ca_layer implements blitting a layer with an alpha channel, enabling window transparency.

On a screen redraw, awm traverses the list of open windows. Each window has all of its View's drawn. When a View is drawn it draws all of its sub-Views, Labels, Button, Bmp's, etc.

Views composite all of their sub-elements onto their backing ca_layer. Views and their elements are composited together onto the Window, which is composited to the desktop view. awm tries to prevent drawing where unnecessary, and draws forefront windows more often than obscured windows. It does not draw Window's which are obscured. Alternatively, the programmer can provide a draw callback, filling in a View ca_layer manually. This is the preferred API, and the imperative draw-stack is marked for deprecation. Just like the imperative API, draw callbacks are called less frequently depending on the Window's z-index.

#include <gfx/lib/window.h> //Window*
#include <gfx/lib/ca_layer.h> //ca_layer*
#include <gfx/lib/Label.h> //Label*
#include <gfx/lib/gfx.h> //rect_make, point_make, size_make
#include <user/xserv/animator.h> //create_animation, add_animation

Window* window = create_window(rect_make(origin, size_make(500, 260)));
window->teardown_handler = (event_handler)my_window_teardown;
window->title = "Draw callback example";
window->redraw_handler = (event_handler)update_example_window;
present_window(window);
        

Since we've set the update_example_window() function as our redraw handler, that function will be called every time your Window updates. You can query the delta time since the last redraw from the Window struct. Note: This makes it easy to write a dynamic UI! Static UI's are easy too, you just draw the same thing each frame.

This example code will blank out whatever was in the layer from the last redraw, then render a string and underline to the canvas. Note that, as per these functions, filling shapes of given sizes, scaled font rendering, and graphics primites are all available.

void update_example_window(Window* win) {
    //clear canvas
    draw_rect(win-<content_view->layer, 
              rect_make(point_zero(), 
                        win->content_view->layer->size), 
              color_white(), 
              THICKNESS_FILLED);
              
    const char* message = "Hello world!";
    float label_length = CHAR_WIDTH * strlen(message);
    draw_string(win->content_view->layer, 
               message, 
               point_make(0, 0), 
               color_black(), 
               size_make(label_length, CHAR_HEIGHT));

    draw_line(win->content_view->layer, 
              line_make(point_make(0, CHAR_HEIGHT + 1), 
                        point_make(label_length, CHAR_HEIGHT + 1), 
                        color_gray(), 
                        1));
}
        

void my_window_teardown(Window* win) {
    //do any necessary cleanup
    kfree(my_data);

    //end process
	_kill();
}
        

awm makes use of axle's text renderer. The text renderer is capable of full 4x SSAA antialiasing. An example of using the Window, View, Label, and animation API's is shown below

Window* window = create_window(rect_make(point_make(100, 200), size_make(250, 250)));
window->title = "Example window";
//sets background color of root View of Window
window->content_view->background_color = color_green();

Label* example_label = create_label(rect_make(point_make(50, 75), size_make(125, CHAR_HEIGHT)), "Hello world!");
add_sublabel(window->content_view, example_label);
float to = 0.0;
//create an alpha animation with a duration of 2 seconds
ca_animation* anim = create_animation(ALPHA_ANIM, &to, 2.0);
add_animation(alpha_win, anim);

//add Window to active window hierarchy
present_window(alpha_win);