[Gllug] focus control in KDE

[David Damerell]

On Tuesday, 21 Aug 2001, sean at uncertainty.org.uk wrote:
>I guess I'll play around with some different window managers
>can I do this without logging out? - my first linux was Suse (5?)
>you could happily change window mangers mid session...

It depends. You can change window manager mid-session if your window
manager is not your session manager [1] (under GNOME, it isn't; dunno
about KDE; in a traditional X environment it usually _is_ your session
manager, but not always); in that case, you can just find the window
manager process, kill it, and start a new one from the command line -
or use the facility of your desktop environment to change window
manager on the fly.

If your window manager _is_ your session manager, it will need to be
able to exec other window managers, and either be configured with some
existing options to do so, or able to change configuration on the fly.

[1] Session manager may be a bit of a misnomer here, since the
programs we're talking about don't necessarily do any session
management like xsm does. Basically, when you log in via xdm or run
startx or whatever, /etc/X11/Xsession gets run; when it finishes, the
session finishes. Hence it tends to 'exec' some other program, which
effectively turns it into that other program - which then will finish
the session when it finishes.

[Complication; when you have a $HOME/.xsession, that gets run, and
that will usually then exec another program.]

So when I say 'session manager', I mean the process - there's always
one - that will finish the X session when it finishes.

-- 
David Damerell <damerell at chiark.greenend.org.uk> flcl?

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