On Wed, Oct 22, 2014 at 03:38:29PM -0400, random...@fastmail.us wrote: > Why not just draw the title in a separate window? This is how I always > assumed a suckless window manager with title bars would act.
Hmmm, possibly. I have not really explored this approach, though. Maybe someone else has? :-) I see one major problem: Without reparenting, the window hierarchy would look something like this: root window |-- frame (for firefox) |-- firefox |-- frame (for galculator) |-- galculator |-- frame (for xterm) |-- xterm |-- frame (for xterm) |-- xterm |-- frame (for xterm) `-- xterm This means, only the window manager itself knows which frame belongs to which client window. This could confuse stuff like `compton` (I don't use that but I see a lot of screenshots where people do) and the applications: They don't know that there's a separate title bar window. When exiting, some floating applications (`gitk`, `gimp`, ...) store their last position and size in a file. Next time you start them, they ask the window manager to be positioned at this exact same location and size. If that application does not know that there is a title bar window (that requires extra space), then it will ask for suboptimal/wrong placement. I guess that would be pretty annoying. With proper reparenting, though, the application is aware that there is a parent frame window. GUI toolkits usually take care of this. Even Java does that (OpenJDK even checks for double reparenting because some WMs do this ... for whatever reason). Reparenting is just a common thing to do. But that's just me thinking out loud. I don't claim to be an expert on X11 window management. :-) I'd love to read what others think about this topic. Cheers! Peter