Is there any difference with the X11 atoms XA_WM_NAME and “_NET_WM_NAME”?

Question

Is there any difference with the atom defined in XA_WM_NAME defined in Xatom.h and the one got using XInternAtom(display, "_NET_WM_NAME", False) ?

Edit: I made a little program which prints the integer value of both and I got: _NET_WM_NAME: 312, XA_WM_NAME: 39 , so, they represent different atoms. What are the differences?

Thanks.

Answer 1

They are different atoms, but they both represent the title of the window.

_NET_WM_NAME is part of the newer XDG/freedesktop.org window manager spec . Like other XDG string properties, it's defined as a UTF-8 encoded string, whereas the "legacy" WM_NAME uses the X "compound text" encoding.

Window managers that respect the XDG spec will use the _NET_WM_NAME property instead of WM_NAME if both are set.