[xmonad] nedit-nc -tabbed no longer working

[Ben Franksen]

Brandon Allbery wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 2, 2012 at 11:43, Ben Franksen
> <ben.franksen at online.de> wrote:
> 
>> A few xmonad-versions ago 'nedit-nc -tabbed' suddenly stopped working.
>> Instead of opening the file as a new tab inside the running session, a
>> new window is opened. If no session is already running, I get _two_
>> windows, one
>> with the file I specified (on the command line) and one with a new file
>> ('untitled'), which is quite annoying, especially in a tiling wm such as
>> xmonad.
>>
> 
> I don't quite understand this claim... the most recent release was 0.10.0,
> and before that 0.9.2 which was close to a year older, and before that
> 0.9.1 which was close to *two years* earlier.

It is long ago. Could  be a year or longer, maybe even 2 years.

> I will also note that xmonad cannot normally affect the communications
> channel between the nc client and server, which presumably is a root
> window
> property as is done by most X11-based programs.  It can *read* the
> property, it could even remove it itself if someone wrote the code to do
> so, but even then there would be a race condition between it and the
> server and the server would often win the race.

The communication via properties of the root window (which is indeed what 
nedit does to talk to the server) works fine. 

I did some printf debugging with nedit and actually found the problem (yay):

Nedit expects its own windows to have a property _NET_WM_DESKTOP of type 
CARDINAL. This is the desktop number. But xmonad does not set that property. 
Whereas under e.g. kde, I get (on the first desktop):

ben at sarun[1]: .../deb/hacking > xprop | grep _NET_WM_DESKTOP
_NET_WM_DESKTOP(CARDINAL) = 0

So, here is my next question: is this a property that the wm should set?

This page:

http://standards.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/wm-spec-latest.html#id2577925

seems to say so.

Cheers
Ben