X11 Window Manager

Undergraduate Capstone by myself and Ian Kurzrock

How it Works

1. The X Server / Root Window

Every object in X11 is considered a window. The background/Desktop in X11 is a Window itself - it's called the Root Window. Every GUI application on your desktop is a child of the Root Window.

2. Frame Window

In a reparenting window manager, all application windows are children of a container window, which holds other elements like the title bar and buttons. In our program the frame windows and their children are stored in a linked list of structs called WMClients:

// groups frame windows and the actual app windows typedef struct WMClient { Window frame; // the border/container window Window titleBar; // the title bar to click/drag Window minWin; // minimize, maximize, and close subwindows Window maxWin; Window closeWin; Window child; // the actual application content window Window task_icon; unsigned int x; // the x and y position before maximizing the window unsigned int y; unsigned int w; // the width and height before maximizing the window unsigned int h; Bool maximized; // true if the window is fullscreen Bool minimized; // true if the window is minimized char title[50]; // title of the window struct WMClient *next; } WMClient;

3. Title Bar

The window inside the frame that you click and drag on to move and contains the application title. It's size is equal to frameWidth - (buttonSize*numberOfButtons), so there's room for the maximize, minimze, and close buttons.

4. Minimize/Maximize/Close Buttons

These are (shocker) also just windows, whose mouse press (called button presses in Xlib) are mapped to the minimize, maximize, and close functions for the window:

/* test if any special windows were pressed */ if(e.window == temp->minWin) { hMinimize(e, temp); return True; } else if(e.window == temp->maxWin) { hMaximize(e, temp); return True; } else if(e.window == temp->closeWin) { hClose(e, temp); return True; }

...

Bool hMinimize(const XButtonEvent e, WMClient *c) { printf("Minimize area!\n"); ... } Bool hMaximize(const XButtonEvent e, WMClient *c) { printf("Maximize Button Clicked!\n"); ... } Bool hClose(const XButtonEvent e, WMClient *c) { printf("Close button pressed!\n"); ... }

5. Application Window

This where the actual program contents are contained. When the program is first started it sends MapRequest event to the X server. This is when we reparent the window into a frame and give it a titlebar/ buttons:

Bool hMapRequest(const XMapRequestEvent e) { printf("Map Request Event!\n"); reparentWindow(e.window, False); XMapWindow(d, e.window); return True; }

...

Bool reparentWindow(Window child, Bool before_wm) { ... XReparentWindow( d, child, c->frame, 0, TITLE_HEIGHT ); ... }

Source: https://github.com/williamblair/capstone-wm-github

References: Chuan Ji