The eggtray problem

jd — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 11:12:00 +0200

I still don't know why but many GTK+ applications use something called eggtrayicon. As far as I know, eggtrayicon.c is a file written in 2002 by Anders Carlsson which implements the Freedesktop.org system tray procotol for GTK+ applications.

Problem is that this C file is used in dozens of programs and maybe more, and is a bit bugged. I've already send patches for mail-notification and Audacious. pidgin is the first fixed implementation I found and works quite well. Many other applications are probably affected.

That seems to me like a real problem. Multiple copy of bad code instead of using native GTK+ system tray implementation.

So please stop using this bad implementation…

EWMH and XRandR

jd — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 19:48:00 +0100

Today I decided to add some EWMH support to awesome. It now supports a bunch of this extensions quite nicely.

However, while reading the spec and writing the code, it appears that this forces a window manager to behave in only one way: have a poor desktop support, and no multi-head/XRandR/Xinerama support at all.

The main caveats are that in Xinerama/XRandR mode, you'll have only one root window. And the root window is where you must store the NET_WM X properties… So you cannot handle screens in a independant way like awesome does. That's really a shame.

There's also a big problem for window managers like awesome which are happy to draw several desktops at the same time. There's no support for stuff like that.

So far, I think EWMH is nice but is really too narrow-minded for softwares and people who want to think window management in a different way.

jd:/dev/blog - Tag - xorg

The eggtray problem

EWMH and XRandR