Re: [RP] neat trick

[Jonathan Walther]

On Mon, Apr 28, 2003 at 11:07:52PM -0700, Shawn Betts wrote:
> Jonathan Walther <address@hidden> writes:
>
> > On Fri, Apr 25, 2003 at 10:17:34AM -0400, Caleb Shay wrote:
> > >While I'm posting, I'd like to throw in a feature request, and it SHOULD
> > >be a really easy one to implement.  I want a "sleep N" command which
> > > just keeps ratpoison from executing any commands for N seconds.
> > > Why? Because, as you can see, I use a fairly complex frame layout
> > > with a few
> > >programs that are slow to launch, if I just put the various exec
> > >commands + splits + vsplits into my .ratpoisonrc, my applications end up
> > >in a different frame every time I start since depending on how long it
> > >takes the window to map, a different frame may have focus.
> >
> > No, that is the wrong approach.  Ryan and I are working with the X
> > standards organization and Xfree86 implementors to find a mechanism that
> > will let you, and us, do this 100% correctly.  Using arbitrary delays is
> > an unreliable hack.
>
> I installed KDE for my brother the other day. I found that on many
> apps KDE indicates that it's waiting for the app to start by showing
> an hour glass. The moment the window opens, the hour glass goes
> away. If we could figure out how this is done, I think this would help
> us to solve the above problems.

They do it through one of the KDE libraries.

The thing I am thinking of is a modification to Xlib.  Set an
environment variable, for instance, RPID before running the program,
then the modified Xlib would pass that on to X as an Atom, and attach it
as a property to every Window that gets mapped; that way ratpoison can
draw the connection. 

For instance, 

RPID=mozilla mozilla

Then Xlib passes RPID to X, then ratpoison can check the RPID property
on a window to see what class of app it is, and we could encode other
information like hostname and pid and starting time too.

Jonathan

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