I'm having trouble keeping a window on top of the stacking order. I have two windows with no parent/child relationship. One has a bunch of tools on it and it needs to stay on above the other window. However, clicking on the intended lower window is bringing it to the top above the tool window. I've tried setting the tool window to _NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE_TOOLBAR and I set _NET_WM_STATE_ABOVE. Both are being ignored. Is there a trick to make this work? If not, is there a way to see how the windows are stacked and to manually move the window back to the top when needed? (I don't want to change focus in the process.)

Why?

How is it that you determined your users will NEVER want to put the one window behind the other? They will never want to show off or display one window, or use it for working, while covering or overlaying the not-immediately-useful tool window? How do you know that they'll never ever have a situation like a small screen or a large working window where they won't want to have the tool window covered?

Programs that do that type of thing are extremely annoying. If I put them in a specific order, I want them to stay that way. Don't override the user!

Ordinarily, I would agree. However, the powers at be want it this way. The tool window needs to stay above the work window. That's really all I need. Any other windows on the desktop can be ignored.

This perhaps?

http://tronche.com/gui/x/xlib/window/stacking-order.html

Not too familiar with X11, but can't you make the tool-window a child-window or something, or is that not acceptable?

Making a child/parent relationship would be the ideal way to fix this. However, X11 has a nasty rule that child windows must be completely inside the parent or they get clipped. What I'm looking for is a child/parent type relationship without the parent clipping the child.