[twobob]

So the fronting method:

Well. it's not an exact science and doubtless someone will improve on that I have but:

In essence make a small patch to a loop-mounted COPY of one LUA file.
Restart window manager.

This provides a FAT based hook to do some window manipulation via scripts.

The patch file, an install process, the mounting process, the scripts, the binaries and the libs to all achieve this I now have.

It's a two pass solution - and not for any good reason.

First it will read over the name of the window being added (xdotool is a bit flaky here when it comes to generated subwindows so we need a second pass sometimes to ensure we get all the window names and their linked internal ID's)

Then we refactor that window name into something more conventional and re-inject the window back at the top of the stack.

The loop mount is just a fail-safe to prevent system corruption and will survive until the next major reboot. including surviving awesome restarts.

The installer process manages the mounting and can be safely run more than once.

I'll look to package up what I have.

The crux of all this is that you can from that point onward - Launch a window - With the WRONG naming convention - and have it handled by the native awesome installation.

Effectively paving the way for running a whole host of apps straight out of debian.
And removing the reliance on Xephyr.

It's far from perfect. and in some cases it is slow to recognise sub-windows. but it's what I got.