Passing the execution of a program to another window manager

Question

I am currently using Arch Linux and Xmonad, but it doesn't seem to play all that well with my OpenGL projects for my college course. Currently, I am simply switching to another X server running Openbox and doing all my work in there if I know I am going to be using OpenGL, but I then lose all of the nice tiling features of Xmonad.

Considering that I am the user logged into both X servers, is there a way for me to pass the execution of the OpenGL program to the Openbox X server from the Xmonad X server? That way, all I would need the Openbox X server for is running the OpenGL program correctly.

Answer 1

Inside your WM, the environment variable $DISPLAY indentifies the display. Different X11 instances will have different $DISPLAY variables.

To find out your current $DISPLAY:

echo $DISPLAY

which, for example, prints :0.

Now you can start a program for a specific display:

DISPLAY=":1" someprogram

if security allows it (refer to, e.g., man xhost), the program will open on the specified X11 display.