🚀 go-pugleaf

Regrettably, the ICCCM team was unable to find any way for clients to
reasonably make
colormaps work in the absence of a window manager, due to unsolvable
race conditions in
the protocol with regard to colormaps.  You could make some sort of
half-hearted attempt
to determine whether a window manager was running (say, by attempting to
select for
SubstructureRedirect on the root window, and then deselecting), but it
would be wrong.

As a client programmer, you should therefore assume that there will be a
window manager
running.  There may be transient states in which there isn't, but
colormap installation
shouldn't be a major concern at such times.

Mark