Re: _NET_WM_[GET_|TAKE_|REQUEST_]FOCUS & urgency

[Lubos Lunak <l lunak suse cz>]

On Thursday 26 of May 2005 00:54, Luke Schierer wrote:
> On Wed, May 25, 2005 at 04:34:57PM -0600, Elijah Newren wrote:
> > On 5/25/05, Luke Schierer <lschiere users sf net> wrote:
> >
> > >  The idea that bullet was attempting to address
> > > however was window managers that restrict each application to a
> > > single layer, and force you to raise or lower the layer.  *shrugs* as
> >
> > I don't quite follow what you mean.  Also, do you mean each
> > application, or each window?  (And for legacy apps, can the WM tell
> > the difference?)
>
> from ICCCM, each application *should* be setting a WM_CLASS (amoung
> other things).  in short, yes, X can tell what windows are one
> application, and thus the WM can.  Interestingly, iirc, gnome already
> uses this, to collapse task bar items into single instances with a
> menu showing each window for that app.
>
> some applications utterly abuse this (WM_CLASS especially), but those
> are bugs I'd file with such applications.  Similarly some window
> managers depend on WM_CLASS (and related concepts) abuse (notably
> WindowMaker), but that also is a bug for someone else.

 Actually you cannot completely rely only on WM_CLASS even for non-broken 
apps. You can have several instances of Konqueror running which you should 
consider separate, you can have one instance of Konqueror running but showing 
several windows (which you again should consider separate), and you can have 
dialogs shown for Konqueror from other processes (kwallet can show a dialog 
asking for password that more or less belongs to the Konqueror window, the 
same way kcookiejar can show a dialog about cookies). KWin implements rather 
non-trivial (and hackish in places) logic that tries to guess which windows 
actually are related.


-- 
Lubos Lunak
KDE developer
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