Re: enlightenement and windowmaker support

[Richard Caldwell <rdtzine toriamos org>]

Michael Perry wrote:

> I started out using gnome 99.8 from the suse rpms under windowmaker
> provided there also.  I found that I truly love the windowmaker desktop
> with its easy themes, etc but windowmaker seems to love to create
> appicons for things like the panel and gmc which is rather annoying at
> least to me.

I really like Window Maker and I use it with Gnome, but it does have a few
features that require a little working around.    Application Icons are
something I never really cared for to begin with.  They make it easy to
dock an application in Window Maker, but other than that they just clutter
the screen.   Since you don't really need the Dock when you're using the
Gnome panel it would be nice to have a simple configuration setting to turn
all appicons off.  Unfortunately none of the ways I've tried to make this
happen have worked.

It is possible to turn off appicons for individual applications by right
clicking it's title bar and using the "Attributes..." menu.  That works,
but it's difficult for applications that have no title bar (such as the
panel) and too much trouble to do for every application you'll ever run.
There's even a combination of settings in Attributes that looks like it
should make the "no appicon" setting be the default for all applications,
but it doesn't work.   Perhaps it's possible to make this work by editing
the Window Maker configuration files, but I haven't dug into it deeply
enough to try.

My work around has been leaving the Clip enabled and setting "Auto Attract
Icons" and  "Collapsed" under the Clip options menu.  Presto, the Clip
sucks up all those errant appicons so you never see them.  You need to do
that for each work space and save your Window Maker session to get it to
remember that for future sessions.

That opens another can of worms.  Window Maker has it's own ideas of
session management.  If you do a save your session to save those Clip
settings it will also try to remember everything else you're running at the
time.  As a result Window Maker may try to start additional copies of the
panel and other applications when Gnome starts Window Maker.  It can be a
mess to figure out who is starting what so you're better off to save your
Window Maker session when you're not running any applications.

So yes, if you're annoyed by appicons Window Maker requires some work to
integrate nicely with Gnome.  Maybe someone else here has a better
solution, but it would be nice if the Window Maker configuration tool had
simple options for turning off all appicons and disabling session
management.  Still, if you can get through the initial tinkering Window
Maker and Gnome make an excellent combination.

Richard