[Wsmanager-devel] WS Manager -> X11 bridge

[Nathaniel G. <n8...@gm...>]

Hello,

I'm a big fan of Desktop Manager but there's one thing about it that
I'd like to try to improve on, namely integration with X11.  Unlike OS
X applications, X11 applications are routinely used in multi-desktop
environments and many of them are multi-desktop-aware.  As an example,
take NEdit.  The upcoming 5.5 release supports tabbed editing.  If you
open a document and there's not a window on the current desktop then
it will open in a new window on the current desktop.  Otherwise, it
will open the document as a tab in a window on your current desktop. 
(Of course this behavior is customizable.)  On OS X with Desktop
Manager it cannot figure out what desktop it's on, so this smart
behavior is not possible.

It's actually really easy to support this capability, but it requires
a program linked with the X11 libraries.  We obviously don't want to
link WS Manager with X11, so I'm envisioning a small daemon, call it
dmx11d, that makes the necessary X11 library calls and watches for
interesting X11 events.

I have a pretty good idea of how to write dmx11d, but I don't know how
to integrate it with DM itself.  It will at least need to be able to
find out:
1.  How many desktops there are
2.  What the current desktop is
3.  What desktop a given OS X window (specified by window ID) is on. 
Alternately, a data structure mapping window ID to desktop.

It will also need to be notified when any of the above things change.

Can anybody suggest where in DM's code I should look to get this done?
 Also, is there a simple way of doing inter-process procedure calls on
OS X?

Any constructive feedback is welcome,
Cheers,
-n8

-- 
>>>-- Nathaniel Gray -- Caltech Computer Science ------>
>>>-- Mojave Project -- http://mojave.cs.caltech.edu -->