A window manager written in objective-c: uroswm and gnustep support problems

[Alessandro Sangiuliano]

Hello everyone, is a lot I'm not writing here due of the work i was doing I had no time to code with gnustep, however now I'm back and some months ago I took again my project, the window manager.

To be honest, I'm writing a kit to code window managers, XCBKit and as the name says it is on top of xcb. I was insipred by the étolié XCBKit for some things, but it works in a different way. However my XCBKit will have some usefull code from the étoilé one escpecially the composite support, but is actually really soon talking about compositing.

Actually the status of the kit + the window manager uroswm, is good but a lot of work is needed. Indeed the version is 0.0.10.

Fred helped me privately when something was not clear, the code was too young and really bad to start to talk here. Actually is a bit better but still bad (well not really bad, is a progress!).

The wm is able to handle gtk application in a good way, I can frame them iconify them, moving resizing, closing via WM_DELETE_WINDOW etc etc.

The wm is going to be, slowly, EWMH compliant and ICCCM too where needed.

I started to write it on my old mac laptop with 10.9.5 and XCode 5, as Fred saw time ago in a video I shared with him. When I reached some goals I had to complete, I started the linux port on gnustep and this was really great because I HAD TO CHANGE NO LINES OF CODE!

I literally had just to write the GNUmakefile start the build and all was built and working, in less than 1 hour I had the port complete, so CONGRATULATIONS to all GNUstep developers and contribs. I remeber some year ago when I started with GNUstep porting simple apps form OSX to GNUstep needed some code changes and I was expecting te same for uroswm.

So, it's time to talk about some problems I'm having to get a god support for gnustep apps.

Actually when I reparent a gnustep app in my frame the position is not what I'm expecting, in the zip archive I attached you can see what I mean.

As you can see I have no problems with the calculator and google chrome, while for SystemPreferences (and other gnustep apps) I ever get the app on the shifted on the right or right-bottom.

I'm pretty sure I'm not supporting some EWMH/ICCCM standard that gnustep is using or asking to the window manager. For what I saw gnustep is strongly supporting these stadards.

Do you have some ideas about this?

The branch you should look and where the developing is going is:

https://github.com/AlessandroSangiuliano/XcbKit/tree/feature/gnustep_support

Where map requests are handled:

https://github.com/AlessandroSangiuliano/XcbKit/blob/feature/gnustep_support/XCBKit/XCBConnection.m#L444

Where client messages are handled:

https://github.com/AlessandroSangiuliano/XcbKit/blob/feature/gnustep_support/XCBKit/XCBConnection.m#L895

Where the support for EWMH is going to be implemented:

https://github.com/AlessandroSangiuliano/XcbKit/blob/master/XCBKit/services/EWMHService.m

Same for ICCCM:

https://github.com/AlessandroSangiuliano/XcbKit/blob/master/XCBKit/services/ICCCMService.m

gnustepSupport.png.zip
Description: gnustepSupport.png.zip