scwm and GNOME

[Robert Bihlmeyer <robbe orcus priv at>]

Hi,

I try to implement support for the "GNOME Window Manger Hints
Proposal" in scwm. One problem that has arised is an abstraction clash:

The proposal talks about "workspaces". I understand this as a number
of not necesserily distinct sets of windows, with of these being
called "active". Windows belonging to the "active" set are mapped
(visible), while those not belonging to the "active" set are unmapped.
fvwm and scwm call these sets "desktops". I will call them workspaces
in the following.

(Some definition of the workspace term should be in the proposal.)

The WIN_WORKSPACE_COUNT property holds the number of workspaces. scwm
does not have a fixed number of workspaces. If you put a window on
workspace 777, it is there. scwm can be thought to have an unlimited
number of workspaces.

This does not work well with the GNOME panel's pager applet: The pager 
ignores nameless workspaces, and has problems if the named workspaces
exceed a certain number.

Should I limit the number of workspaces in scwm to a number choosen by 
the user?

Another nit with the proposal:

It would be cleaner, IMHO, to remove the necessity for ClientMessages
(e.g. when a client wants to change WIN_LAYER). The wm can and should
listen to PropertyNotify events on the root and all top-level windows, 
so the client should be able to simply change the property.

	Robbe

-- 
Robert Bihlmeyer	reads: Deutsch, English, MIME, Latin-1, NO SPAM!
<robbe@orcus.priv.at>	<http://stud2.tuwien.ac.at/~e9426626/sig.html>