mlandau@bbn.com (Matt Landau) (02/19/88)
Is there any *generic* way within X11 to convince a program that it should run by overlaying an existing window, instead of creating a new window? In SunView, there is something called a "blanket window" that can be created on top of a normal window. Many SunView programs work by opening a blanket window on top of whatever window is named by the $WINDOW_GFX environment variable. This allows one program to create a window, then run another process within it by setting WINDOW_GFX to the name of that window before forking a child. Is there some way to get the equivalent effect in X? I've looked at both the Xlib and protocol documents, but don't really see what I'm after. Ideally, it would be possible to set some kind of hint for a client to indicate that a window creation request should really return the id of an existing window, rather than create a new one. This would allow completely naive clients to be run inside windows created by other applications on their behalf.