Switching back from icewm to wmaker

[Jon Leech]

Running wmaker 0.95.9 on Debian. Occasionally I need to switch to icewm due to steam not working properly with wmaker; this works OK from the Session menu, though I'm unclear what the 'Start Another Window Manager' action actually does. However, I don't know how to switch back from icewm to wmaker. Trying to run wmaker from a shell while icewm is active gives a 'fatal: it seems that there is already a window manager running' error. I can't just kill icewm and start wmaker manually since that kills the X session.

My (vague) understanding of ICCCM 2.0 is that window managers are capable of notifying an existing one of their intention to take over, but it's not obvious how to do this from wmaker - icewm has a '--replace' option.

Any ideas on how to switch dynamically back *to* wmaker are welcome.

Jon

[Torrance, Douglas]

Years ago, there was some discussion about adding this feature, and even a
patch to do so [1], but it was never merged.

https://www.mail-archive.com/wmake...@lists.windowmaker.org/msg03163.html

[David Maciejak]

In fact it was. But the feature is disabled by default, see commit: https://repo.or.cz/wmaker-crm.git?a=commit;h=ea2b5f064178c854ca401d1203e5be1362a4c97c