Removing decorations from a window

[Brian J. Tarricone]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Chris Green wrote:
> Further to my previous enquiry about removing decorations from a
> window, I seem to be between two opposing camps arguing about how this
> should be done but with neither camp giving me the tools to do it!
> 
> Since the decorations are created (and customised) by the Window
> Manager it seems to me reasonable that the Window Manager should offer
> options which allow one to say that certain windows should have no
> decorations.  However the xfce Window manager doesn't seem to offer
> this possibility.

What seems reasonable to you may not seem reasonable to others...  IMO,
the WM should do what apps tell it to do, and offer minimal, if any,
"override" functionality.

> So I go to the other end and look at the options in Xlib and there all
> I find is that, since the decorations are created by the Window
> Manager it's non-portable to have functions to remove the decorations
> from the client end.
>
> Grrrr!

Not sure what you're looking at, but it's probably very old: most modern
WMs will follow the spec and pay attention to WM hints.  Xfwm4 will, at
least.

> It's surely possible because some of the xfce utilities don't have
> decorations, maybe I'll end up having to look at the source code for
> them but I fear they go through GTK etc. and I want the basic Xlib
> functions to get a window without decorations.

Well, GTK uses doesn't do anything GTK-specific to remove window
decorations.  It's uses Xlib as its backend, y'know.  I suggest you
implement the Xlib way in your app and see if it works, rather than just
ranting and whining here.  This isn't an Xlib programming help ML, after
all.  If you still can't figure it out, grab the GTK source and look at
how GTK does it (hint: start at gtk_window_set_decorated()).

> The 'right' solution to my mind is that it should be configurable in
> xfwm, is this do-able?

Doable, sure, but unlikely to be accepted as a patch, unless Olivier has
a change of heart...

	-brian

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQFDCeuw6XyW6VEeAnsRAmKdAKC0qGoIGHz5Gkeg5sRQ0jovnc83HQCgjC+o
ZVz5Zc2mNEovo2rZ6pl+6yc=
=Dzn+
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----