Cannot reopen Empathy from Enlightenment Systray by clicking its icon - check _NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW usage
Submitted by Joel Madero
Link to original bug (#676771)
Description
There is an issue with Empathy and the Enlightenment desktop environment (or Window Manager depending on who you ask). The issue is that when you minimize to the systray you are unable to bring your buddy list back up by clicking on the icon in the systray. After talking with one of the lead developers of the E project he has said that unfortunately it will not be solved on their end but can be solved on the specific software (there are multiple pieces of software that have this issue but others work fine). Here is the message that was sent to me by the E developer where he suggests two solutions for the Handbrake team:
[quote] ask them to check if _NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW is in the list of _NET_SUPPORTED atoms on root (see netwm standards) and if it is, use the _NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW activation request to request the window become active.
the other alternative is instead of iconifying, withdraw the window (unmap or hide it, not iconify). since you have a tray icon anyway that acts as an icon, iconification is already redundant. i'd say the 2nd option here is best. [/quote]
as for the original bug that I reported with them, this was their response:
[quote]
- opera works like a charm for me. that's because it withdraws its window - not iconifies.
- clementine indeed works just fine
- havent tried empathy
- tried handbrake-gtk... and this does do what you say.. but there is a catch... it's broken because we can't unmap windows (hide them) when they are iconified. why? compositing. we have to keep windows mapped for the ability to see miniature live previews of the window. if we don't we no longer have a working/updating pixmap. the problem here is handbrake tries to do the old-fashioned method of getting out of an iconified state... it... tries to map its window. but... it's already mapped and thus nothing happens. there is an alternative - the netwm activate request.
so we have a problem. in order to do compositing properly/well into the future we CANT unmap windows that are in fact iconified. they must stay mapped so we can access their content - eg for the comp-scale module (it does this) or if we later make ibox show window "previews" etc. (we will in e18 and so on when compositing goes into core). we really can't sanely avoid doing this. but this causes this problem. it's pretty much unavoidable beyond applications changing/adapting and trying different mechanisms IF the wm supports things like the netwm activate protocol (client can check and find out). we COULD make rulesets where u can "ban" e from keeping some windows mapped when iconified and thus lose the pixmaps in this state, but frankly we dont have such a feature and there isn't a plan to add it. [/quote]
Version: 3.5.x