Some windows forever lost if they have _NET_WM_STATE_SKIP_TASKBAR property

[astier]

Some windows forever lost if they have _NET_WM_STATE_SKIP_TASKBAR property

[astier]

Could it have anything to do with the fact that herbstluftwm is reparenting and my wm is not reparenting?

[astier]

I just checked and if I open the pycharm-setting-window in herbstluftwm it doesn't have _NET_WM_STATE_SKIP_TASKBAR set. Maybe it gets deleted by hlwm.

[sagb]

Setting/unsetting _NET_WM_STATE_SKIP_TASKBAR is likely pycharm's own decision.

I've used WMs which maximize all windows, without a taskbar, for years. Sometimes modal windows have not been recognized by alttab, probably for the reason you described here, but rarely and apps didn't appear unusable, so it was never be a problem for me.
Nevertheless, I'm going to add an option for this.

[sagb]

Please try alttab -ns.

[astier]

It works. Thank you. With this option enabled I can let the wm decide if a window should be ignored by alttab or not by (not) adding the respective window to _NET_CLIENT_LIST_STACKING. You can close the issue if you want.

[astier]

But if you want I also can just configure my wm to delete the _NET_WM_STATE_SKIP_TASKBAR property from windows which I want to show up in alttab if you don't want to deal with the additional code and think this would be a more idiomatic solution. Whatever you prefer I am fine with both.

[sagb]

Let it be altab feature.

[astier]

I've used WMs which maximize all windows, without a taskbar, for years.

May I ask you what you are using now?

[sagb]

Ratpoison. Probably should have been switched to stumpwm, but they have obfuscated keybinding stuff too hard.
Herbstluftwm is probably also worth trying.
What is your custom WM?

[astier]

Just something I wrote myself. It's a private repo. The only thing it does is maximizing all windows, managing a couple ewmh-atoms so other software can work nicely with it (like alttab) and thats it basically. I use alttab to change windows and sxhkd to manage keybindings. ~300SLOC But I think I will have to add soon the ability to see two windows beside each-other. I started out with dwm but eventually removed almost all code which I didn't need and rewrote the rest.

[astier]

Eventually I realized that I don't need different desktops and tiling. Just maximizing and stacking is enough since I use tmux to manage my terminal-windows. Alttab was the last piece I needed to be able to switch efficiently between windows. Thanks for the great work! But as I said eventually I will have to tile one window on the left and one the right for my work. But it still will be stacking also. I will be able to stack windows on the left side and also to stack windows on the right side but also maximize them. Basically a tiling-stacking wm. I call it split-and-stack-wm.

[sagb]

This is reasonable approach for clean workspace.
Good luck, wish you to publish your work eventually.