[fpc-pascal]Window Maker and FPC

[Marco van de Voort]

> Has anyone attempted writing an application for Window Maker ?
> More specifically, has anyone attempted to write a docked window maker
> applciation ?

No, but I am a windowmaker user.
 
> Just on the subject of gui applications, I take it most people use GTK
> and that it is the perfered gui framework to use ?

That is apples and oranges;

GTK is a widget set, (like QT, Athena, Motif etc)
Windowmaker is a windowmanager (like KDE's kwm, sawfish, twm, blackbox etc)

So you roughly have a hierarchy like this:

1 libx11
2 widgetset        (gtk,qt,athena,motif,lesstif)
3 windowmanager    (wmaker,blackbox,twm,kwm,sawfish,enlightment etc)
4 desktopmanager   (gnome,kde)

where each layer builds on the previous. (some integrate a bit more then others, but
that is why I said roughly ;-)

IOW, GTK and windowmaker are on two separate levels, and all widget sets work with all
windowmanagers etc.

Windowmaker is inbetween baroque buildings like KDE and spartan TWM that it also
has "extra" functionality and is highly configurable. Iow, it is a bit of 3 and 4.

To easily us "extra" windowmanager, one needs a way to communicate with it. I don't know
how windowmaker does that, but I think the wmaker sources,docs and demoapps will show that.

Note that as soon as you use this kind of extra functionality, you have to make it
optional, (iow do a windowmaker detect, and turn it off if wmaker is not
detected running) or the app won't work with anything else but windowmaker.