How can I fix a Java-GUI-program (swing), that it works with awesome-wm?

Question

The swing-UI of Java-programs doesn't work perfectly together with the awesome-wm. awesome is a window-manager for UNIX, that automatically resizes program-windows, and the Swing-UI doesn't recognize these resizes correctly. I don't care if awesome or Java is guilty, what I wanna know if I can change my Java-programs in a way, that they will work with awesome. So that users of my programs get the correct experience, even when they use exotic window-managers.

Answer 1

You might find that this is a similar problem to that experienced with using Compiz and Java (on Ubuntu at least), but I am guessing.

The fix for this (taken from here) is to add the following environment variable to your program:

AWT_TOOLKIT="MToolkit"

Answer 2

From the man page of awesome:

BUGS
   Of course there´s no bug in awesome. But there may be unexpected behaviours.

   Java applications which use the XToolkit/XAWT backend may draw grey windows only. The XToolkit/XAWT backend breaks ICCCM-compliance
   in recent JDK 1.5 and early JDK 1.6 versions, because it assumes a reparenting window manager. As a workaround you can use JDK 1.4
   (which doesn´t contain the XToolkit/XAWT backend) or you can set the following environment variable (to use the older Motif backend
   instead): AWT_TOOLKIT=MToolkit

Answer 3

Easiest workaround - get wmname from suckless and use it to set the name of the window manager to LG3D:

wmname LG3D

98% of the time this will fix the issue.