There is a middle way solution. I just thought about it, and will probably have its drawbacks, but here it goes: keep a bar with only the tags and tile symbol and print the sel client title to stdout. This way you can use an external program (dzen) to render the title (and status text, of course). I don't think nobody needs unicode glyphs in their tag names or tile symbols, you wouldn't need cairo in dwm (but could add it to dzen) and would remove a lot of loc getting ride of status text and window title. About the reparent call, I don't think is a good idea. There are lots of dwm similar wms around, and it is very easy changing between them. I would keep dwm as pure as possible and would let the others to handle the dirty stuff, but of course I'm not the one who needs to use those broken apps...
hth, -- - yiyus || JGL .
