Re: How to know if metacity is the window manager?

["Nigel Tao" <nigel tao gnome gmail com>]

> Why do you need to know the window manager's mouse focus settings?
> The only case I can think of for that is IDE for GUIs and thus you
> want to create the illusion of having "windows" managed inside your
> window.  Is there any other case?  (or are you, by chance developing
> such an IDE?)  Just curious...

I'm writing a (keyboard-activated) libwnck-based window switcher [1]
that has an on-screen popup window (one that is
GTK_WIN_POS_CENTER_ALWAYS).  Now, under default settings, things work
fine, but my WM is metacity with focus_mode sloppy and auto_raise (or
something similar), and if the mouse is over window A, and I switch
(via the keyboard) to window B, then this popup comes and goes, the
mouse "re-enters" window A without ever having moved, and window A
takes focus from window B.  Thus, my switcher can't actually switch to
window B.

I have a work-around where I XWarpPointer the, uh, pointer to be over
window B, so that when the popup goes away, the mouse "enters" window
B, so it retains focus.  However, I only want to do this on sloppy or
mouse focus_mode.  I'm reading the gconf values, but really I should
also only inspect metacity's settings iff metacity is the actual WM in
use.

That's my reasoning, better ideas welcomed.  Like if I can somehow
suppress window A's raising some other way.

And while I'm here, AFAICT I can't raise or lower windows Z-order (??)
through libwnck, since that's handled in metacity, right?


[1] http://code.google.com/p/superswitcher/