Re: Gnome compliant WM

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Tue, 2004-02-10 at 12:03, Paulo Jorge de Oliveira Cantante de Matos
wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Where can I find info on how to develop a gnome compliant window
> manager...??? or... how to develop a window manager at all?

One place to start reading documents would is at freedesktop.org: 

        http://www.freedesktop.org/Standards/Home

In particular, you want to read the Extended Window Manager Hints (EWMH)
document (from http://freedesktop.org/Standards/wm-spec/) and look at
the various compliance claims of the window managers on that page. GNOME
should work very well with any EWMH-compliant window manager.

In practice, there is an extra curve ball thrown into the picture: there
is some interaction between the panel and metacity that I think is
specific to metacity. It sprung out of this mail thread
(http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2003-February/msg00341.html), but I cannot find the followup mail from a month or two later when Mark committed the changes (at the time, I remember he wrote a good explanation of what happened). The post was to the same list, so you can probably hunt it down. In any case, this is not something that is going to be a problem for writing a window manager -- you probably won't care about it for a while.

Finally, do yourself a favour and have a look at how metacity does some
of the things if you are looking for example code. It was written by
somebody who was reasonably sane when he started writing it and has been
fairly well maintained, so it's nice enough code to poke around in.

Cheers,
Malcolm