Best way to determine user's screensize?

[Chris Angelico]

On Sun, Nov 1, 2020 at 3:35 AM Grant Edwards <grant.b.edwards at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 2020-10-31, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> do you object to a window being put in the approximate
> >> center of the screen?
> >>
> >
> > If that's where my window manager chooses to put it, great! The
> > application just says "I want a window of this size"
>
> But let the widget/toolkit layout engine figure out the size. The
> application developer should just specify what widgets are needed and
> how they are to be arranged. The developer should _not_ be specifying
> window sizes.

Correct. There's effectively a negotiation up and down the chain where
the application itself doesn't care one iota what a "pixel" is, and
its window's size is defined by content. A lot of sizes will be
defined in terms of text ("I want an entry field big enough for 40
characters", which is an approximation of course, but a useful one),
and others might be defined by other things, but the precise pixel
dimensions are up to the layout engine - which should be using native
widgets, which effectively puts the control back in the hands of the
window manager.

And putting control in the hands of the window manager means putting
it in the hands of the user. The user can configure his/her computer
completely. It is not the application's computer, it is the user's.

ChrisA