re standard colormaps in article rjdk inncnh senator bedfellow mit edu jgealow mtl mit edu jeffrey c gealow writes i m working on an x r application and have concerns regarding standard colormaps the x r documentation says usually a window manager creates these colormaps i wonder what window manager the writer had in mind neither twm or mwm seem to create standard colormaps standard colormaps were spec d with the intention that window managers would make them available this doesn t mean that every window manager author in the world immediately dropped everything they were doing and implemented this at top priority the esge server we ship makes the xa rgb best map available at startup it doesn t wait for window managers to do it of course one can use xstdcmap to create standard colormaps however xstdcmap doesn t seem to try very hard to avoid conflicts with the default colormap when i use standard colormaps created by xstdcmap the rest of my display goes black so it seems as if use of standard colormaps causes the very problem standard colormaps are intended to avoid perhaps if every application used standard colormaps things would be wonderful but not many applications seem to use standard colormaps does your hardware have only one clut since standard colormaps typically devour all entries there is no way it can avoid displacing the entire default colormap if your hardware has only one clut i don t believe standard colormaps are intended to aboid possible colormap flashing between clients using the default coilormap rather colormap flashing will be avoided between two clients that use the same standard colormap an example would be two clients that need a full color range would both use xa rgb best map or whatever it s called under x r if you are trying to avoid colormap flashing with the default colormap your best bet is to try to load all the colors you use into that colormap if you can t do that then you ll get flashing on a one hw clut framebuffer now if your window manager used the same standard colormap as your client this flashing could also be avoided perhaps some window managers have command line options for selecting standard colormaps paul pmartz dsd es com evans sutherland
