Re: GNUstep's NET_WM support

[Andrew Ruder]

It seems that a long time ago Alex Malmberg brought up the idea of 
having window manager/environment specific bundles to -gui.  Perhaps 
that idea should be talked about some more.  It seems like it would 
accomplish what you want to do here.

- Andrew Ruder

> Hi there, I was recently looking into how to make GNUstep play nicer 
> with GNOME and KDE's panels, which sit at the bottom of the screen. As 
> it stands now, GNUstep draws its own miniwindows and appicons, which 
> by default go into the lower left corner of the screen. This is 
> problematic for most GNOME or KDE users. What I would like to see is, 
> if the GNOME or KDE panel is running, GNUstep then would not draw its 
> appicon at all, but would use EMWH/NET_WM hints to get an actual 
> listing in the panel as it should be. I believe this would go a long 
> way in convincing new adopters of GNUstep, most of whom, statisically, 
> use either KDE or GNOME, to come aboard. I was told recently by 
> someone in #freedesktop that GNUstep only needs to implement a few 
> EMWH/NET_WM hints for this to happen. Obviously also there needs to be 
> a mechanism for GNUstep to automagically disable the drawing of its 
> own appicons/miniwindows as well.
>
> What do you think about this and how feasable do you think it is? Do 
> you think it's a good idea? I really think this would help improve the 
> image of GNUstep.
>
> On another somewhat related note,  the wm-spec page at 
> http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/wm-spec contains a table with 
> links to various window managers COMPLIANCE files, listing the level 
> of NET_WM support. We should probably have one of these in 
> back/Documentation and then once that's in place we should definately 
> email the folks at Freedesktop.org and have them add it to their list.
>
> Also, I was talking with Alexander Malmberg, and he thinks that if 
> GNUstep had the _NET_MOVERESIZE_WINDOW hint implemented, the chronic 
> and debilitation window drifting which Mr. Weinstein is experiencing 
> would go away. I know others also experience this drifting, but I am 
> not one of them. Mr. Weinstein is using Apple's X.app, which is a port 
> of XFree86 which uses an Apple window manager which is likely NET_WM 
> compliant. Their window manager uses the native WindowServer to draw 
> native decoration windows for X applications, making them feel a 
> little bit more mac-like.
>
> Cheers,
> Alex Perez