On Sun, Jul 6, 2014 at 10:57 PM, Magicloud Magiclouds < magicloud.magiclouds@gmail.com> wrote:

Thank you for the explanation. I always thought "focus" was managed by WM.

Explicit focus is managed by the WM. But you don't explicitly choose a window to receive focus when the focused window goes away. The window manager is not invoked then, instead the server checks the focus inheritance policy *of the window that just closed*. And the default is to give focus to (the X server's idea of) the "previous window". It doesn't ask the window manager which that is, or ask the window manager to change the focused window; it determines that and assigns focus itself, and the window manager finds out about it from the subsequent FocusIn event.

Is "above" also controlled by X instead of WM? I tried to patch the code of the clock to manage itself (keep itself topmost), but did not seem to work.

Older programs do it themselves; modern programs tend to expect the window manager to do it based on EWMH hints, but xmonad does not implement the window layers part of the spec --- and it's not clear *how* to implement it in xmonad's model, as it runs into the same problems as Bug 4 (all the horrible problems with floating windows in xmonad's model). More or less, the way you'd have to do it is to call XRaiseWindow() regularly, possibly in response to any X11 event other than Expose (sending it on that event risks an infinite loop since the server will generate an Expose event if any part of your window was covered). (This kind of thing is why EWMH moved it into the window manager. Now if only we could do it right given how the StackSet works....) -- brandon s allbery kf8nh sine nomine associates allbery.b@gmail.com ballbery@sinenomine.net unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonad http://sinenomine.net