Re: Iconifying windows

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

"Dr. Peter Rottengatter" <peter rottengatter de> writes: 
> Fine, if it (window maker) did. But it doesn't. I might not have asked this in the 
> first place if I hadn't observed many other apps providing an iconify to "secondary"
> windows. Sylpheed is a GTK+ program doing it, the "Message View" (double-click on the 
> message opens it), the "Compose" and "Reply" functions all open windows with an
> iconify button. Then, on the other hand, you're talking dialogs, where this makes
> sense. At least with Glade terminology, most of my windows aren't dialogs.

The way a window manager will traditionally decide a window is a
dialog is by seeing if you've set the window's parent with
gtk_window_set_transient_for(). You should _always_ be setting the
transient parent though, not setting it just to allow iconification is
sort of a bad thing since you lose other features such as keeping the
dialog on top of its parent window.
 
> > Anyway, not something you should fix in your app, just a window
> > manager feature/misfeature that might affect your choice of WM.
>
> As it is not consistent, it obviously is not a WM issue.

Are you sure Sylpheed sets the transient parent on its dialogs?

As an aside, with GTK 2 and newer window managers, GtkDialog gets
marked as a dialog regardless of the transient parent setting.

The right thing to do is to provide the window manager with maximum
information about a window's type and its relation to other windows,
and then choose a window manager that handles things the way you want.

Havoc