Making the Processing IDE play nicely with xmonad

If you’ve had problems when running the Processing IDE, or indeed any other Java Swing applications, under the xmonad window manager on Linux, here’s the cure – just a simple edit to the ‘processing’ executable (which is really just a shell script). Open it in you favourite text editor, then select the following lines:

# JARs required from JDK (anywhere in/below the JDK home directory)
JDKLIBS="rt.jar tools.jar"

And paste the following in their place:

#Make us work with xmonad
export AWT_TOOLKIT=MToolkit

# JARs required from JDK (anywhere in/below the JDK home directory)
JDKLIBS="rt.jar tools.jar"

You should also be able to add the export line to your .xinitrc or your .bash_profile, the former being more sensible if you never use X applications over a remote login. For some reason, however, Processing seems to require the variable to be set every time it is run, hence we export it from the startup script.

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