Subject: FVWM: Can fvwm swallow itself?

From: Anthony Heading <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 26 Mar 2000 15:16:54 +0800

Hi,
    It's been a long while since I read about X, so apologies if I'm
miles off track.

    I'm pondering over the design of an application with lots of
"windows" - a sort of gigantic configurable control panel.

    One route I've seen people taking is writing such windows as
widgets in some toolkit language (e.g. Tcl/Tk) and then writing a
custom widget control manager in that language.

    But I was reminded of an interview I saw last year with (I
think) Jim Gettys, saying that the capabilities of X to embed
windows had been much underused.

    Which reminded me further of fvwm buttons ability to swallow
windows, and I then *seemed* to recall that fvwm had the ability
to run inside itself: advertised as being useful for debugging.
But I can't find any reference to that ability now.

    So finally my query: is it possible/sensible to run fvwm
inside another window manager instance,  controlling not the
display and the root window but instead a single large window,
swallowing and then managing all the top level windows of
my application?

Any thoughts appreciated.

Regards

Anthony
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From: [email-masked] (Danny Dulai)
Date: 26 Mar 2000 11:00:59 -0000

>swallowing and then managing all the top level windows of

As far as my understanding is, the WM is a special X client that deals in
special ways with the server and root window.  This uniqueness allows for
only 1 of such types of apps at once. (if I'm wrong, someone correct me)

You might want to look into Xnest (part of XFree86), which runs a whole new
X server inside an X window. You can run FVWM or whatever else you want
inside this window.

-- 
___________________________________________________________________________
Danny Dulai                                           Feet. Pumice. Lotion.
http://www.ishiboo.com/~nirva/                            [email-masked]
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From: Nathan Froyd <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2000 01:30:14 -0500

> swallowing and then managing all the top level windows of

If I understand what you're saying, you might want to check out ctwm, which
allows a "captive" window manager -- basically another ctwm running in an X
window. Not sure how it accomplishes this, though.
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</nathan><sig>[email-masked]  |  http://www.rose-hulman.edu/~froydnj/

...you could spend *all day* customizing the title bar. Believe me. I speak
from experience. --Matt Welsh                                           </sig>
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