[Xlib] Saving state before an unmap

[Andrew Troschinetz]

On Feb 16, 2009, at 3:54 AM, Lubos Lunak wrote:

> On Friday 13 of February 2009, Andrew Troschinetz wrote:
>> On Feb 12, 2009, at 3:13 AM, Lubos Lunak wrote:
>>> I think you should try to find somewhere a good description of  
>>> what a window manager is, and specifically why it has 'manager' in  
>>> its name - it is the window manager that is eventually in control  
>>> of the windows and not the other way around. The more complicated  
>>> things you try the more likely is that the window manager will  
>>> have a different idea about it, so I suggest you instead consider  
>>> to try to add your wanted features to your favorite window manager.
>>
>> Sigh. It's not productive for anyone here to be condescending.
>
> If that's what you call saying that things are the way things are.  
> The window
> manager is eventually the one in control of all the windows, hence  
> the name,
> and applications just give hints and requests. It is up to the WM to  
> decide
> what to do with those and whether at all. I'm sorry that somebody  
> told you to
> dig a garden with a pole, if the window managers you will use will  
> be lenient
> enough and you will not want too complex things it may work with  
> enough
> hacks, but it still doesn't change anything about the fact that  
> you're trying
> to dig a garden with a pole. But if you want to find out on your  
> own, fair
> enough.

I don't believe the point you're making in any way addresses my  
expressed goals. I would point out that 99% of the library I've  
written to solve the issues I'm facing is exactly the functionality of  
GNOME libwnck. From the description of the project libwnck is meant to  
be "used to implement pagers, tasklists, and other such things." Which  
is essentially what I'm trying to do. You wouldn't call being able to  
raise a window by clicking on its icon in a pager digging a garden  
with a pole, would you? Well instead of a pager I have a menubar, it's  
not that different.

However libwnck is for GNOME, I am attempting to do something lower- 
lever that will work (whenever possible or fail silently) on GNOME and  
Motif (at the least -- however I would like to note that I have done  
some cursory testing on KDE as well and it seems to work fine there  
too).

I realize that all I can do is set hints and make requests. However  
those actions have concrete results in terms of WM response. The only  
thing that matters to me is figuring out exactly how to prod the WM in  
such a way as to get the responses I need. I'm sorry if it horrifies  
you that I'm making my WM work for me, rather than against me.

--
Andrew Troschinetz
Applied Research Laboratories
(512) 835-3410