WB moves my icons alone...

On what criteria WB automatically moves icons on the WB after its opening ?
I have my drive icons on the left border from top to bottom of my WB and I want my RAM disk to be the first one, other eventually don't matter, so I snapshoted the icon at the right position, then copied back the RAM:disk.info to ENVARC:Sys/def_ram.info then I reboot. For a short period, I can see that my ram disk is effectively the first icon, then for an unknown reason icons are rearranged and ram becomes the last.
What happened ? Why ? How can I prevent this ?

@abalaban

The easy solution is to put this in your user-startup:

Copy envarc:Sys/def_RAM.info RAM:Disk.info

@hotrod

Yes that was what I did in previous OS4 incarnation, but I wanted to know why this is happening...
Also this solution does not seems to me a very elegant one.
Thank you thought for your answer.

@abalaban

Just snapshot your other icons a little further away from where the RAM disk will appear.

Oh, and make sure you don't have a disk in any drive when you boot, as that tends to screw up the placings.

Chris

@abalaban

Quote:

Icon positions are stored in the icons (.info files). When you snapshot the ram disk icon, the coordinates are stored in ram:disk.info, i.e. in the ram disk itself. And all files stored in ram are lost after a reboot, so the snapshot is lost, too, unless you manually copy the icon somewhere and restore it before Workbench is loaded next time.

There is a quite elegant solution for the ram disk which works since OS3.9 with Boingbag 2: add the following line to your user-startup:

makelink ram:disk.info envarc:sys/def_ram.info soft

This connects the ram disk icon to the file it is loaded from by default. So you can snapshot it like any other (permanent) disk icon.

Workbench also moves icons out of the way automatically if they are too near at each other. This is only done on the desktop, though, not in drawers. IIRC you can specify the minimum distance between two icons in Workbench prefs since OS3.9, too.

Bye,
Thomas

@thomas

Thank you for your answer, if you reread my first post, you'll see of course that I copied back RAM:Disk.info to ENVARC:Sys/def_ram.info after the snapshot.
Also there is no 'need' to add a "copy ENVARC:Sys/def_ram.info RAM:Disk.info" into the user-startup because since OS 3.5 (or was it only 3.9?) ENVARC:Sys/def_ram;info is automatically used by the ram disk.
However my problem is that doing this I *can* see for a short period that my ram disk is at the right position, however it's moved away after. Now that you tell me that WB automatically moves overlapping icons I guess this is my problem : IIRC I have some of my drives icons that are "unsnapshotted" leaving WB choose the right position, so it's possible that one on them tries to display at the top left corner and that triggers an icon rearranging what is unpleasant is that it's the second icon that is trying to display upon a previous positionned one that "wins" and stay at the position ?!?
I would have leave the previous icon, and placed elsewhere the new one... But without knowing the algorithm that decides we can only do suppositions and guesses.

... Thinking of it I'll do some more tests this night, may be it's the icon that has the lowest Y coordinate that wins, so snapshoting my ram icons a bit closer to the top may solve my problem... I will let you know.

@abalaban

Add this to your s:user-startup

makelink ram:disk.info envarc:sys/def_ram.info soft

Anything you do to your ram icon is automatically done to the def_ram icon too, snapshotting, changing the image etc...

@All

Ok that's it now I have snapshoted my ram icon at the top of the screen and it not longer produce the effect : the ram disk stay at the top and other icons go under
So it seems the WB algorithm is to keep the icon that is the most at the top and reposition the other.