> A current discussion with the gaim developers about some gaim > mis-feature has made me think about abandoning EWMH support > completely. In my eyes, the only usefull message it has is the > FULLSCREEN stuff. Everything else is just causing trouble.
I remember anxiously waiting for fvwm to better support Gnome... Support for mini icons, taskbar, and pager at least. > Reasoning: > > * Most of the EWMH features are intended to mix applications > written for the different desktop environments (DE), e.g. a KDE > pager with a GNOME taskbar. > * If fvwm is not running under a DE, these features are utterly > useless. How typical is it to use fvwm with KDE/Gnome? Or are typical fvwm users using plain non-DE setup? > * If running under a DE, using the DE's pager, taskbar, etc. is > not necessary as fvwm has a rich set of these modules. Yes, but there are other reasons to use DE's pager etc. - e.g., embedding fvwm pager into Gnome panel works much worse than using Gnome pager, fvwm modules look different (Gtk+1). > * An increasing number of applications mis-uses the EWMH hints to > do funny things. > * Most users have *no* chance to control such appications. For > example, the problem with SkipMapping and gaim that led to the > discussion on the gaim list. It took the user several days to > figure out the problem and had to ask the fvwm developers for > help. So, how do the other window managers work in the same cases? > All this leads me to the conclusion that the EWMH spec (at least > the client message part) offers very little benefits but causes a > huge amount of trouble. It is simply not worth the effort. > > I vote for abandoning EWMH support (at least the client messages). > > Opinions? Fvwm works quite well with Gnome now, and Styles still make it worthwhile to have manually configured setup. Dropping EWMH support completely would make me to switch wm. That's like a statement "fvwm is intented for non-DE use only". Some problematic cases are different - I don't really see much point of trying to work there better than other window managers. Quite likely noone is going to pick fvwm just because it follows spec more qlosely than some other window manager. Pekka
