Removing decorations from a window

[Bruce Miller]

Biju Chacko wrote:
> Heinrich Rebehn wrote:
> 
>>I have to object at this point. Any software should do what the *user*
>>tells it to do, and if for some reason i do not want a decoration, i
>>want a tool to suppress it, be it devilspie or a capable wm. After all
>>this is easier for me than to edit the app's source.
>>And, since i definately refuse to edit xml config files by hand, i keep
>>recommending sawfish wm.
> 
> 
> The point is that the user shouldn't have to care about things like 
> window managers -- what the heck are they anyway? 

Hmm, um a manager of windows, perhaps? :>

I should know better than jump into a recurring debate that has already
gone on too long, and I'm not specifically attacking Biju, but ....

If they want a 
> particular application to behave in a certain way, they should ask the 
> *application* not the window manager.

Perhaps so, perhaps not.  What if I want _all_ applications to behave
a certain way? Do I have to ask them all individually, or can I just
ask the window manager. What if I want some windows to perform some
interesting feat that has nothing to do with the application itself,
say Shading, or Sticking or ... something new; who do I ask then?
Do we have to rewrite all applications to require them to say whether
or not they can be shaded? Is Shading fundamentally different from
decorations, that a window manager can choose the former, but _not_
choose the latter?  Maybe these properties are called "Hints" for
some accident of history --- or maybe they really intended to be nothing
more than a hint that the wm can respect, or ignore, or even override.

What I'm really trying to say is that there's an awful lot of
unnecessary dogmatism about this subject on both sides; what a
wm should do or must do or must not do or whatever.   As has already
been said in this thread, let the developer do it the way they like;
We can try to convince them one way or another without declaring
Right & Wrong.

That said, I'm pretty happy with xfce in general and xfwm specifically.
I also happen to be pretty fond of sawfish.  You choose what works
best for you at the moment, and you dream of (or sometimes develop if it's
important enough) the best of all worlds.

To further annoy you all and get into some details; I actually think
it's kinda silly to have most of these options built into every application
--- or worse, be `forbidden' to change something simply because the app
author declined or forgot to add that to the menu --- when the wm can
easily have a single menu that can be applied to all of them.
The real underlying problem (imho) is the nightmare that a wm has in
reliably figuring out _which_ windows you wanted certain features applied to!
(the first window with name foo should be positioned here, with decorations,
but the second with that name, providing it's class is bar, should be
in the 3rd workspace....)  I suspect that is what makes many wm developers
say "Nope, not the wm's job, no, uhuh, sorry"  (is a :> needed here?)

bruce