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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    App launch feedback (was: Re: visibility?)
From:       Peter Astrand <altic () lysator ! liu ! se>
Date:       2000-03-29 11:24:52
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>>> I saw another way to get a clue about which app is behind a window
>>> in scwm:  Use LD_PRELOAD when starting a program to load a library
>>> that overrides XCreateWindow() and sets a property with the pid 
>>> whenever a window is opened.

>This weekend, I've been testing the LD_PRELOAD approach. It seems to work
>very well, actually. I've made some changes to the SCWM source, and also
>hacked a tool that can be used for tracing the launch. 

I now have a working tool. Download
http://www.lysator.liu.se/~altic/projects/xalf/xalf-0.1.tgz and see if it
works as good for you as it does for me. 

The tool is quite similiar to Busycursor. The main differences are:

1) XALF can reliable detect if newly mapped windows are belonging to a
particular launch. It does this via the SCWM/LD_PRELOAD technique. 

2) XALF does not use the mouse cursor as an "indicator". Instead, it
creates a invisible window to be shown in a standard task pager like
Gnomes tasklist_applet or the KDE Taskbar. 

I still believe it would be a good thing is something like this could be
integrated into KDE and Gnome. 

The xalf-tool uses some few lines of GTK-code, I think it's trivial to
port it to QT. 

Comments are appreciated. More information about Xalf is on
http://www.lysator.liu.se/~altic/projects/xalf/. 

/Peter Astrand <altic@lysator.liu.se>

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