Window Decoration Workarounds

[Michal Szymanski]

> On Fri, 2004-10-08 at 13:58 -0400, Jonathan B. Horen wrote:

> xfwm4 does not, and will never, include any mechanism to bypass what the
> application wants. The application should allow this by using standard hints
> for Window Managers. Moreover, by doing it in the application, it will work
> with all WM. Gkrellm2 is a good example of such implementation."

> OK, fair's fair.  So, does anyone know of a replacement for "xclock" (which, 
> sadly, doesn't know about window-manager resources)?

Nice to see I am not the only one unhappy about that feature.

I do not want top start any "religious" discussion here, I am also by any
means an expert on WMs, hints and related stuff. Still, I would very
much like to see an explanation (or a pointer to it) why putting the
decoration (title bar, border) around an app's window, which - correct
me if I am wrong - is a WM's job, cannot be controlled on WM's side.
It has been so all those long years since 'twm' early times.

Well, as Jonathan said, fair's fair. If the Author decided so, we have
to accept it (or stop using it). Trying to adapt, I am trying to
write a "hinting application". I am mainly using XForms - nice, simple
environment. It offers a "FL_NOBORDER" option to the routine showing the
form window. It works with XFce4 but the window created this way becomes
totally unmanageable - one cannot move it, even raise/lower.
Unfortunately, the XForms manual warns the user that this is a likely
behavior. So the question is - how can one have a decoration-less (or,
at least, title-bar-less) window that could be moved/raised etc.

Last but not least, two more specific questions:

1. Olivier suggested:
> "oclock" maybe?

I've tried oclock with all possible options given in its manpage - it
always gets full decoration (Fedora Core 1, xfce 4.0.4). What is the
trick then? 

2. Similar question for "xbiff" which I have been using for about 15
years (so I got sort of used to it, you know). When I see my little sweet
xbiff with the title bar crammed with overlapping buttons, I burst into
tears :) So I ask the gurus for a xfce-xbiff-plugin - must be a very
simple job for anybody who knows-how.

regards, Michal.

-- 
  Michal Szymanski (msz at astrouw dot edu dot pl)
  Warsaw University Observatory, Warszawa, POLAND