Question

I am developing an application that will run on Linux to run fullscreen all the time (no menus or trays or anything will be visible).

The application is going to be developed in Python, not that that matters as far as the window manager, but what I am having a hard time with is choosing a window manager.

I need something with the smallest possible footprint, that will let me run a graphical Python app and have an mplayer window at the same time, at widescreen resolutions (widescreen, 16:10,16:9, etc). Other than that, it doesn’t need a lot of features, but the end footprint size is the most important thing I’ll be looking at.

What window manager would you recommend?

EDIT: There won’t be any interaction with the application needed.

Answer 1

You don’t actually need any window manager or display manager. All you need to do is open your initial window with the same geometry as the root window. I suppose you could even draw directly into the root window if you wanted.

If you are using some display library it probably has an easy way to open a full screen window. For example using a recent enough version of SDL through pygame you can do

pygame.display.init()
surface = pygame.display.set_mode((0,0),pygame.FULLSCREEN,0)

to get a window that fills the entire screen. This will work even if there is no window manager running.

As for mplayer, it accepts the -geometry flag, so you can use something like mplayer -geometry 640x480+20+20 to display the mplayer window 20 pixels from the top 20 pixels from the left and with a size of 640×480 pixels.