Linux with ratpoison WM: pop-up windows lacking title

Pop-up windows (dialogues, preferences, startup messages, etc.) lack window titles, apparently making it impossible to perform window-title based actions on them.

This probably doesn’t come up with windowing window managers. However, I use a tiling window manager (ratpoison). For things like DAWs the tiling behaviour isn’t appropriate, and ratpoison helpfully allows certain named windows to be unmanaged. This works fine with the main Renoise window, however the sundry additional windows that are created are again managed by ratpoison, causing chaos, abdominal pain, and ultimately compromising critical load-bearing members in the structure of the building.

I’m open to ideas on how to get around this (currently I remap C-t so that it isn’t captured by Renoise and can continue to be used as ratpoison’s control sequence, and then use it tiled as normal), however I think that it’s also a bug that could be resolved by naming the little auxilliary windows.

This is one of the main reasons I stick with Awesome, it has optional floating workspaces. Without this I have problems with plugin guis an the behaviour you’re talking about. I don’t really have a solution but I’ve noticed similar issues with other music programs as well.

Haha I guess I’m not as open-minded as I like to think then, since I don’t think I could stretch to a switch in window manager. That functionality of Awesome does sound extremely handy for audio production, although I’m sure that there must be some kind of work-around even for me if it would be possible to identify the windows as belonging to a particular package!

I often work at 1024x768 because I have a projector set up over my bed and the temptation to veg out with a giant display overcomes pragmatic concerns. So I’m in the habit of mostly switching between single frames that occupy the entire screen. You can also set up fancy window-sets and such in rp so I can imagine that, assuming a higher res display, I could have a fixed Renoise tile and a number of auxiliaries that might accept pop-up windows as they happen. It’s really fun to do the tiles thing with GIMP, for example, where the general number of little windows is kinda known from the start anyway.

But it would still be great to have window titles—more to work with!

Renoise sets the proper hints for windows (override-redirect, WINDOW_TYPE_DIALOG, …). Your WM should not try to manage those windows. That’s what i3 and awesome do for example, so dialogs and preferences float. It breaks the tiling paradigm, but it is very usable.

That’s true but not respecting some of those hints allows ratpoison to do useful things like suppressing rude windows and so on. I agree that there could be a more nuanced way to handle how a user decides on what to do with particular hints, although it’s also possible that there is and I’m just not aware of it yet.

In any case everything works very well within the tiling paradigm for me once Renoise is configured not to override system shortcuts.