Alan Horkan wrote:
The Gnome HIG needs a section on Panels/Palettes to make things clearer for projects like Inkscape. Perhaps I can incorporate some of the Guidelines created for GPE (Gnome Palmtop Enviroment). It is one of those many things I just haven't gotten around to yet.
I don't know much about Gnome, but I have noticed that some apps can hint to KWin to draw palette panels with a very slim title bar. Inkscape's palettes are not drawn like this.
My guess is that this is
_NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE_UTILITY [1]
which would correspond to
gtk_window_set_type_hint ((GtkWindow *)window, GdkWindowTypeHint::GDK_WINDOW_TYPE_HINT_UTILITY);
Don't know about other WMs and I'm now using Compiz which I don't think does this, but it would at least provide the WM with the information it need to apply the correct behaviour. I'm sure Compiz/Beryl will need this information one day too: it currently shuffles Inkscape's palettes in with main application windows when doing Exposé, which is very untidy.
Dan
[1] http://standards.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/wm-spec-latest.html#id2511216