[ale] Need some X11 (and toolkit) programming help

[JD]

Very interesting problem and well beyond my few yrs of X11 programming
in the mid-1990s.  I still have the complete set of Xlib, Xt, and Motif
books here too. If anyone is interested, they could use a good new home.

I haven't a clue how to accomplish what you are seeking.   At the risk
of showing my ignorance, have you considered writing modules for each
window manager to support iconification through a callback?

If I were starting out trying to solve a similar problem, I'd look at
FVWM code and modules.
http://www.fvwm.org/documentation/manpages/unstable/FvwmIconBox.php

Ignorance properly displayed?


On 03/29/2011 02:04 PM, Michael Trausch wrote:
> I'm wondering if anyone on the list is a "guru" when it comes to X11 
> programming.  I'm having a very difficult time on a particular problem 
> that I have been trying to solve on and off for... nearly two years now.
> 
> This concerns AllTray, which I adopted at the end of 2008.  I rewrote it 
> largely in Vala, to make it easier to work on (and the source code 
> seriously needed to be rewritten anyway---it had grown organically over 
> the years and became a very "legacy" code base).  The rewrite has most 
> of the functionality, but some of the things that the old AllTray 
> codebase did were far from EWMH compliant, and there were lots of 
> "clever tricks" in the source code in order to deal with differences 
> between GNOME, KDE, Compiz, and other window managers and the like.
> 
> One of the goals of this rewrite of AllTray was to make it possible to 
> run on all systems, and try to adhere to the X11 application principle 
> of being network transparent.  The current release version of AllTray 
> which distributions are using (or rather, are expected to use) is 0.71a, 
> while the current version of the development branch is 0.7.4dev.  The 
> 0.7.5dev release is blocked on one feature that it would appear everyone 
> who uses AllTray much relies on: close-to-tray.
> 
> Close-to-tray is one of the features of the old AllTray source that was 
> particularly nasty.  It did not work with all window managers.  For 
> KWin, it would have the user draw a triangle around the window manager's 
> "close" button, and intercept clicks in that area.  For (many) other 
> window managers, it would reparent the window and embed it, but that 
> came at the cost of breaking drag and drop (not something I am willing 
> to compromise in the development series leading up to the next stable 
> release).
> 
> I spoke with someone who works on X.org a while back (probably four or 
> five months ago) and (s)he said to create an X11 window and make its 
> parent the window of the application that I am interested in 
> controlling.  I've figured out how to do that much.  But it doesn't seem 
> to work right.  If I create the X11 window as a child of the root 
> window, it shows up correctly; it's opaque and uses the background color 
> that I set for it.  If I create it as the child of another application 
> window, however, it is like "punching a hole" into the application 
> window.  I am, as I so often seem to be when looking at X11 without the 
> aid of a toolkit, utterly confused.
> 
> I have X11 books here.  They have yet to help me understand the problem. 
>   :-/
> 
> Help!
> 
> 	--- Mike