XLIB Programming Manual, Rel. 5, Third Edition

13.3 Standard Geometry

One of the preferences that must be handled by clients is the preferred size and placement of a window or icon. By convention, rather than having the user specify various elements of the size and placement with separate options, clients accept a single standard geometry string, which has the following format:

<width>x<height>{+-}<xoffset>{+-}<yoffset>

Items enclosed in <> are integers, and items enclosed in {} are a set from which one item is allowed. The xoffset and yoffset values are optional. They determine the position of the window or icon—for the top-level window, they are, by convention, interpreted relative to the origin of the root window. The convention is that if the sign of xoffset or yoffset is positive, they specify that the offset is measured from the top or left edge of the application window to the top or left edge of the screen. If the sign of xoffset or yoffset is negative, they specify that the offset is measured from the bottom or right edge of the application window to the bottom or right edge of the screen.

After being read in from the command line or from a preference file, this string can be separated into separate x, y, width, and height values with XParseGeometry(). See Chapter 14 for an example that uses XParseGeometry().

In addition, there is a function called XWMGeometry() that can be used to parse a partial geometry specification from the user. XWMGeometry() takes a geometry string specified (presumably) by the user, which might ...