wrapper for window managers

Mike Hokenson openbox at gozer.org
Mon Mar 3 16:40:29 EST 2008


Hi list,

This is a bit off topic and since I've never had any problems with
Openbox 3 crashing, may not be of particular use to anyone here, but I
thought it'd be worth posting anyway...

I've always wanted a wrapper to keep my X session open in the event of a
window manager crash or abnormal exit, something that could start up an
alternate if things are going really bad. "until openbox; do :; sleep 5;
done" works, but only to a point. Something a bit more functional would
be useful if you're bouncing between window managers for whatever
reason, notably those without a menu or the ability to restart into
another (if there is such a thing), or where you don't care to learn the
configuration to build/customize a menu.

The closest thing I could find was wmselect, but I didn't see anything
about handling exit codes, it's just a list that would come up
regardless.

Anyway, attached is wmwrapper.c (also available at
http://www.gozer.org/programs/c/files/wmwrapper.c), a tiny gtk2 app that
presents a window with a list of window managers and an xterm fallback
(in a GtkComboBox). Aside from scanning for a list of known window
managers in $PATH, I can't really think of anything else to do. See
comments for compiling instructions, usage, and configuration.

Mike
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