Task list and mini-icons

[Samuel Solon <ssolon usa net>]

I've gotten to really like the task list applet but without "meaningful"
mini-icons it's much less useful. I notice that the mini-icons can be set
from properties on the windows but it doesn't appear that any Gnome
programs do this and we're left with the problem of legacy programs which
will probably never handle the mini-icons in the required way.

There is already a mechanism in gnome for associating an icon with an
application, the .desktop file, so it would make sense to use the Icon
entry of a desktop file if the application doesn't indicate an icon in some
other way.

Most applications set the WM_CLASS property of a window and this can be
used to find a <class>.desktop file somewhere in the
$(DATADIR)/share/gnome/apps hierarchy. 

This means that the .desktop file associated with an application should be
named the same as the WM_CLASS property but that shouldn't be too much of a
problem.

Legacy apps can be handled by creating a .desktop file for them. If the
executable isn't found the file won't have an entry in the menus created,
so there isn't any negative impact.

The attached tar file contains patches to add this capability (diffs
against gnome-core-1.0.53). It's a little messier than I'd like but I
wanted to keep the icon lookup separated from the rest of gwmh. Also making
this messier is that the code to lookup the icon (and other desk handling)
is in applet desk-guide, which is #include from tasklist.

Untar the file at the applets level of a source tree to create the new
classicon.[ch] files in the desk-guide directory along with a diff file in
desk-guide/ and tasklist/ which can be used as the input to patch.

This has certainly made my life much better. ;-)

--
Sam Solon
ssolon@usa.net

small-icon.tgz