How to make an app stay on top, and remove its menu bar

[Walter Dnes]

  I don't know if this is a Blackbox question or an X resources
question.  Please bear with me while I explain.  I wanted a simple
program-launcher.  gnome-panel wants to pull in 90% of GNOME, and its
KDE equivalant is just as bad.  Other panel programs also seem to
require a ton of libraries.  That is not the Blackbox way.  I finally
settled on a really simple system.  I named it ESPL (Extremely Simple
Program Launcher).  It only requires me to install xmessage, and set up
2 text files.  ~/bin/espl (be sure to chmod it executable) and ~/.esplrc

[d530][waltdnes][~] cat .esplrc
4NEC2X wine start c:/windows/profiles/waltdnes/Desktop/4nec2X.lnk
AbiWord /usr/bin/abiword
Firefox /usr/bin/firefox -width 950 -height 1100 -P default
Freecell /usr/games/bin/xfreecell
GIMP /usr/bin/gimp
GoogleSearch /usr/bin/firefox -P default http://www.google.com
gnumeric /usr/bin/gnumeric
kill_mpg123 killall -9 mpg123
xterm /usr/bin/xterm -geometry 80x55 -bg black -fg cyan -fn -*-fixed-medium-*-*-*-*-200-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1
Wideopen_ffox /usr/bin/firefox -width 950 -height 1100 -P wideopen

[d530][waltdnes][~] cat bin/espl
#!/bin/bash
commandline="xmessage -geometry 790x38+0-0 -buttons EXIT:1"
commandarray[1]=exit
buttonpointer=2
while read xlabel xcommand
do
  commandarray[${buttonpointer}]=${xcommand}
  commandline="${commandline},${xlabel}:${buttonpointer}"
  buttonpointer=$(( ${buttonpointer} + 1 ))
done < ~/.esplrc
commandline="${commandline} -file /dev/null"
commandpointer=0
while [[ ${commandpointer} != 1 ]]
do
  ${commandline}
  commandpointer=${?}
  eval ${commandarray[${commandpointer}]} &
done

  espl is launched by inserting the following line into .xinitrc

~/bin/espl &

  So far, so good.  I have a launch bar at the bottom left of the screen
that, with a click of a button, executes commands that I run often
enough to want available on a launch bar.  xmessage is "an ordinary
application". I have 3 more wishes regarding it...

1) I want the xmessage launch bar to be "always on top".  I can manually
do that from blackbox, but that's kludgy.  I'd like it to be automatic.

2) In order to not take up unnecessary space, I want to remove the menu
bar from the xmessage window

3) On a slightly less important level, I'd like to have xmessage *NOT*
show up on the applications list that pops up when I hit {ALT-TAB}

  I'm open to any combination of ~/.Xresources or other config files
and/or environmental variables.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org>
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