Re: [dwm] Floating children

2008/9/28 Carlos Pita <carlosjosepita_AT_gmail.com>:
> as I'm no expert I would like to ask you about the possibility of
> opening clients that are children of a floating one as floating
> themselves, disregarding the current layout.

If these clients set the TRANSIENT_FOR hint to reflect they are
relatives to some kind of main window, this will work out of the box.
Otherwise not. You can ask the developers of these apps to set the
TRANSIENT_FOR flag on these windows.

> For example fluid, the gui designer for fltk, which follows the gimp
> and gaim ugly paradigm of presenting a number of floating windows. I
> can add a rule for floating its main window, based on its class. But
> the child windows has no class or instance properties that can be
> ruled as floating, and the titles are unmatcheable without regexp
> support, so I need to manually move them to the floating state (and
> there is no fixed set of windows, new ones are always popping up
> during the work session). Even worst, if the current layout is, say,
> monocle, they are automatically maximized, so I need to resize them
> every time too. Of course, I could change the layout to floating each
> time I enter fluid's tag, but then I also need to remember to revert
> to monocle -my "default" mode- upon tag exit. As you can see, there is
> a lot of manual, fallible, work involved.

Sounds like the app you are using is broken in many regards, bug the
developers of this app. The changes they need to do are really simple,
just setting some proper hints on the windows will do the trick.

> I'm a bit reluctant to patch dwm pertag just for this. I think it's
> more sensible to make floating client's children recursively floating.

The problem is, that the children windows you are referring to are no
child windows in the sense of X, they are only child windows from a
semantical point of view of the application itself.

> What do you think? Can you help me implement this, if it's possible at
> all? (I'm not even sure whether X has a notion of parent-child
> relationship between clients or not)

Usually this relationship is reflected by using the TRANSIENT_FOR hint instead.

Kind regards,
--Anselm
Received on Mon Sep 29 2008 - 07:04:20 UTC