R devel - Feb 2010 - R's X11 Device Properties

Hello,

This is an issue that is at the interface of R, X, and my window manager 
(either icewm or openbox, both latest versions).  I am running R 2.10.1 on 
Ubuntu 9.10.

My goal: When an X11 device is started in R (e.g., by simply calling 
plot), I would like for the resulting window to be in the "always on
top"
state, and for focus not to switch to it.

Configuring this behavior is handled through the window manager, but both 
of the above referenced window managers require that the first element of 
window's WM_CLASS property, second element of window's WM_CLASS
property,
or the window's WM_WINDOW_ROLE property be set so that the right window 
can be matched.

If I start R, type
> plot(1,1)
and then run "xprop" (command line program to inspect X window
properties)
on the resulting X11 window, none of these properties show up in the 
resulting output.

Is there any hope for this to change?  I did notice in ?X11 that "The 
standard X11 resource geometry can be used to specify the window position 
and/or size, but will be overridden by values specified as arguments or 
non-NA defaults set in X11.options. The class looked for is R_x11."

This "R_x11" class works fine for setting the geometry in .Xresources,
but
it does not seem to be the same "class" as WM_CLASS referenced above. 
Unfortunately, this is about as far as my knowledge of X goes, so 
hopefully this makes sense. If anyone has any pointers, they would be 
welcome. Thank you!

Best Regards,
Erik Iverson

On Mon, 1 Feb 2010, Erik Iverson wrote:
> Hello,
>
> This is an issue that is at the interface of R, X, and my window manager 
> (either icewm or openbox, both latest versions).  I am running R 2.10.1 on 
> Ubuntu 9.10.
>
> My goal: When an X11 device is started in R (e.g., by simply calling plot),
I
> would like for the resulting window to be in the "always on top"
state, and
> for focus not to switch to it.
>
> Configuring this behavior is handled through the window manager, but both
of
> the above referenced window managers require that the first element of 
> window's WM_CLASS property, second element of window's WM_CLASS
property, or
> the window's WM_WINDOW_ROLE property be set so that the right window
can be
> matched.
>
> If I start R, type
>
>> plot(1,1)
>
> and then run "xprop" (command line program to inspect X window
properties) on
> the resulting X11 window, none of these properties show up in the resulting
> output.
>
> Is there any hope for this to change?  I did notice in ?X11 that "The 
> standard X11 resource geometry can be used to specify the window position 
> and/or size, but will be overridden by values specified as arguments or 
> non-NA defaults set in X11.options. The class looked for is R_x11."
But the WM_CLASS is not set.

http://tronche.com/gui/x/xlib/ICC/client-to-window-manager/wm-class.html

shows how you could prepare a patch.  As so often with window manager 
issues, we need someone who uses that WM and wants the feature to try 
it out.
> This "R_x11" class works fine for setting the geometry in
.Xresources, but it
> does not seem to be the same "class" as WM_CLASS referenced
above.
It is not.
> Unfortunately, this is about as far as my knowledge of X goes, so hopefully
> this makes sense. If anyone has any pointers, they would be welcome. Thank 
> you!
>
> Best Regards,
> Erik Iverson
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>
-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
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