Volume 6A: Motif Programming Manual

17 Interacting With the Window Manager

This chapter provides additional information on the relationship between shell widgets and the Motif window manager

(mwm). It discusses shell widget resources and describes how to use functions in the Motif toolkit to add and modify

window manager protocols.

This chapter provides technical details about how Motif applications can interact with the window manager. It

discusses when and how to interpret special window manager events and client messages, how to set shell resources

that act as hints to the window manager, and how to add protocols for communication between the application and the

window manager. In the course of the discussion, we cover the major features of the X Toolkit Intrinsics' WMShell

widget class, which handles basic window manager communication, and Motif's VendorShell widget, which handles

window manager events that are specific to the Motif window manager (mwm).

The material in this chapter is advanced; you should typically not interfere with the predefined interactions between an

application and the Motif window manager. When you do so, you risk interfering with the uniform look and feel that

is at the heart of a graphical user interface such as Motif. However, the material in this chapter should provide you

with an understanding of some important concepts that may allow you to make your applications more robust. This

chapter also discusses the use of protocols and client messages for window manager communication. These

techniques ...