FVWM: Forcing window decorations

[Tethys]

How can I force decorations onto windows? Having upgraded to Fedora
22, I now find that many of my windows now appear to be doing client
side decorations, presumably in anticipation of Wayland. But it's
horrendous. I want my own window decorations back. How can I achieve
this?

A good example of this behaviour is evince. I've tried explicitly
telling it I want a title bar, handles, etc:

Style "Evince" Title, Handles, BorderWidth 5, HandleWidth 5

but that seems to be ignored. Any ideas? See attached screenshot.

Tet

[Tom Horsley]

On Thu, 29 Oct 2015 19:26:06 +0000

Post by Tethys
How can I force decorations onto windows?

Some of the stupid apps have a setting you can change in the
app itself (I know google-chrome has one), other than that
I don't know.

I've never been able to find a coherent description of
what the heck a "wayland" is, but every time anything
specific I can actually see changes for the sake of
wayland, it always appears to be a horrible regression :-(.

[Dan Espen]

Post by Tethys
How can I force decorations onto windows? Having upgraded to Fedora
22, I now find that many of my windows now appear to be doing client
side decorations, presumably in anticipation of Wayland. But it's
horrendous. I want my own window decorations back. How can I achieve
this?
A good example of this behaviour is evince. I've tried explicitly
Style "Evince" Title, Handles, BorderWidth 5, HandleWidth 5
but that seems to be ignored. Any ideas? See attached screenshot.

Try:

Style * EWMHIgnoreWindowType

Then contact the Evince developers and tell them NO, NO, NO!

Let us know if that works. My copy of Evince doesn't display that
problem, so my suggestion is purely a guess.

[Tethys]

every time anything specific I can actually see changes for the sake of
wayland, it always appears to be a horrible regression :-(

Pretty much, yes :-(

Style * EWMHIgnoreWindowType

Nope, that didn't work. I'll buzz the evince developers, but I'm
pretty much certain they'll ignore me. I don't exist in their brave
new Gnome3 world.

I wish I knew enough about this to work out what was going on. I'd
guessed that evince was setting some kind of hint to tell the window
manager to not decorate it. But EWMHIgnoreWindowType should be enough
to override that, no? There's nothing in my config file to set
NoTitle, yet the evince window has that property set.

FWIW, eog and totem are examples of other applications that suffer
from the same problem.

Tet

[Dan Espen]

Post by Tethys

Post by Dan Espen
Style * EWMHIgnoreWindowType

Nope, that didn't work. I'll buzz the evince developers, but I'm
pretty much certain they'll ignore me. I don't exist in their brave
new Gnome3 world.
I wish I knew enough about this to work out what was going on. I'd
guessed that evince was setting some kind of hint to tell the window
manager to not decorate it. But EWMHIgnoreWindowType should be enough
to override that, no? There's nothing in my config file to set
NoTitle, yet the evince window has that property set.
FWIW, eog and totem are examples of other applications that suffer
from the same problem.

My eog is also okay.

Perhaps:

GNOMEIgnoreHints

[Tethys]

On Fri, Oct 30, 2015 at 4:43 PM, Jaimos Skriletz

There is no bug here from my perspective. FVWM is correctly honoring the
hint/state set by the GTK3 apps that use this feature. It would be a bug if
FVWM did not honor this. Now there is a feature request here, to allow FVWM
to be configured to ignore this hint/state on particular windows. But this
would be a feature of FVWM to ignore the hint.

We're getting into somewhat meaningless semantics here. But for me
it's a clear bug. FVWM's job is to manage windows. If it doesn't
manage windows because a misbehaving application asks it not to,
that's not sensible behaviour. My desire to have my desktop behave the
way I want trumps the application developers' desire to screw me over.

Tet

[Tom Horsley]

On Fri, 30 Oct 2015 17:10:57 +0000

Post by Tethys
My desire to have my desktop behave the
way I want trumps the application developers' desire to screw me over.

Which is practically the main reason for FVWM to exist. Every other
nonsense request from apps can be overridden by FVWM (like ignore
program position and put the window where I want it or ignore stacking
requests and let me move the main window on top of a child dialog
so I can actually see the info I need to fill out the stupid dialog :-).

[Dan Espen]

Post by Tethys
On Fri, Oct 30, 2015 at 4:43 PM, Jaimos Skriletz

There is no bug here from my perspective. FVWM is correctly honoring the
hint/state set by the GTK3 apps that use this feature. It would be a bug if
FVWM did not honor this. Now there is a feature request here, to allow FVWM
to be configured to ignore this hint/state on particular windows. But this
would be a feature of FVWM to ignore the hint.

We're getting into somewhat meaningless semantics here. But for me
it's a clear bug. FVWM's job is to manage windows. If it doesn't
manage windows because a misbehaving application asks it not to,
that's not sensible behaviour. My desire to have my desktop behave the
way I want trumps the application developers' desire to screw me over.

Did my suggestion from yesterday get missed?
You should try:

Style * GNOMEIgnoreHints

If that doesn't do it, I'll build a recent version of one of these from
source and try to find out what's going on.

[Tethys]

Style Evince !MWMDecor
Problem solved.

That does indeed solve the problem. Many thanks. I never dreamed that
mwm's legacy would still be alive today! Indeed, I started using fvwm
because it was the closest thing I could find to the mwm that I was
used to when I started using Linux. I thought gtk would be using
something ewmh related to achieve the lack of decoration that rather
than mwm hints.

Tet