Best way to determine user's screensize?

[Chris Angelico]

On Sat, Oct 31, 2020 at 11:53 PM <2QdxY4RzWzUUiLuE at potatochowder.com> wrote:
>
> On 2020-10-31 at 13:02:03 +0100,
> "Peter J. Holzer" <hjp-python at hjp.at> wrote:
>
> > On 2020-10-31 12:30:43 +1100, Chris Angelico wrote:
>
> > > There is no valid way for an application to read my mind and size
> > > itself. Attempting to query my screen size seems to just make things
> > > worse in a lot of situations.
>
> > You still haven't answered the question: Where should the initial
> > window size come from? Does your window manager tell the application
> > how large a window should be? And if it does, can you as a user
> > configure that? I don't think mine (xfce) does that. (I guess tiling
> > WMs generally do that, but I've never used one.)
>
> The intial/default window should be big enough to contain the
> initial/default content, regardless of the configuration of the
> screen(s)/monitor(s).  "The GUI," whether it's something near the
> bottom, like X11, or something more complicated, like GTK or Qt, should
> have the information and/or the API to make the widgets usable and the
> text readable, possibly based on user configuration (e.g., I like 6
> point type on my 288dpi laptop display; other people might like 12 point
> type on their 72dpi big screen monitor).

This. The window manager gets information from the internal layout
manager, but the application itself shouldn't care. I should be able
to build a window by saying "it should have a notebook, and that
notebook should have a label saying Name and an input big enough for
20 characters, and below that a label saying Class and a drop-down
with options Wizard, Cleric, Fighter, etc, etc, etc, etc". At no point
should pixel sizes or screen sizes be within the scope of my
application.

ChrisA