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Window Manager Bits 76

Posted by justin++ from the one-two-skip-a-few dept.
Anonymous Coward writes "WindowMaker 0.50.0 is out, and includes full KDE support, as well as numerous improvements in usability and appearance as well as the usual bugfixes.
Following the announcement that Blackbox 0.50.2 included limited KDE support last month, this make 3 enhanced window managers available to KDE users. " Notably, Window Maker also includes GNOME support, at least where it can...
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Window Manager Bits More

Window Manager Bits

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  • Why? (Score:1)

    by Shiska ( 131 )
    0.20.3 --> 0.50.0 !?


    ----------------- ------------ ---- --- - - - -

  • Blackbox (Score:1)

    by Erich ( 151 )
    I use blackbox, and I must say it's pretty sweet. A nice, clean, fast window manager. And prettier than olvwm. ;-)

  • Blackbox (Score:1)

    by Erich ( 151 )
    I love ol(v)?wm too... just blackbox is prettier. I really like sticky menus and the pager in olvwm... but I use blackbox some now, too, because it is a little smoother. olvwm is there, though, whenver I'm doing heavy window moving across desktops.
  • Strange, my wterm (wterm-6.2.3) barfs when I use the -tint command line. Do I have the wrong version or is that a compile-time option ?
  • Window Maker isn't the One True Way, after all. It's just a very good window manager. If it can handle Aterms, and the GNOME and KDE stuff, then why not go ahead and use those things with Window Maker? Just do what works.

  • Posted by name_:

    You can get the latest version of wterm from :

    ftp.dct.com/pub/WindowMaker
  • Posted by deskjock:

    Yes...It is much healthier for Linux when users have choices. In the end I would be tickled pink to be using a Gnome Spreadsheet & a KDE Presentation Package -- along with another 3rd party E-Mail Reader...People have been "tuned" by Microsoft to think they need all of their products coming from the same source. (That is one of the key things that drove me away from Windows)

    Lets please keep the diversity, and let the parties (KDE and GNOME) thrive off of each other.

  • Posted by John Swinbank:

    Surely the whole thing is basically bloat, no? I mean, if you just want speed and efficiency, why not use straight rxvt?

    I see nothing wrong with a bit of bloat in exchange for some eye candy, as long as it's configurable. A simple transparency (or even a tint effect) seems completely pointless to me, so I'm sticking with rxvt for the moment (can't get along with Eterm at all!).

  • I was going to respond that I love olvwm, then I read that other responce and realised you were talking about beauty.

    fools, functinality is where it is at. I love the way I can drag windows across the desktop from the virtual desktop, have windows partially on a couple different desktops, drag windows from the desktop to the virtual desktop, and the way the virtual desktop shows me the title of each application so I can find it in the clutter I always have.

    Beatiful i would never call it, but I don't need beauty. Least of all when I sometimes log into a SLC (sun's version of the imac, 17" black and white monitor beige case, and released long enough ago that most are failing now) You don't want a pretty window manager cause the prettyness will be worse in black and white. Am I the onlyone who remembers how much better black and white monitors are for staring at text all day?

  • What exactly does KDE or Gnome support in Window Maker get you?
  • We had a bunch set up at school, and they were the most pathetic things I have ever seen. They had xdm login screens burned into the middle of the screen, and had the worst contrast ever. Everything was some shade of grey -- no actual black or white was present.

    Of course, if you're checking your mail with telnet, who cares?
  • Nor do I want it to. I'm a GNUStep person myself but I have one thing to point out, RHAD. People are paid there to work on Gnome. Now having said that there is a distinct style difference...

    1) The C/C++ thing. This is a style difference of people who are action oriented and object oriented. People who like to optimize speed and people who optimize code.

    2) Flamboyance/Unobtrusive. People will always want to shock others with how in depth there screen looks. And some don't want to be annoyed by it.

    3) Even though some see more mainstream support for KDE, there is much more mainstream support for the GTK than QT. Some main applications (Mozilla for instance) have already switched or are making plans to switch from Motif. I saw an article last year comparing all the major graphical tool kits (TCL/TK, Motif, Open Look) and suprise GTK was even there before it reached 1.0. I can't remember if QT was in it too, but if it was it didn't get near as much attention. I've seen plenty of articles since.

    To sum up, there are inherent style differences that I think will keep both alive. And if there is going to be a clear winner it is way to early to tell.
    ^~~^~^^~~^~^~^~^^~^^~^~^~~^^^~^^~~^~~~^~~^~
    ABORTED effort:
    Close all that you have.
  • I actually like it. It is still one of the slickest, elegant looking and functioning window managers around. It could use a bit of an update though, but I think its toolkit is pretty much dead. I can assure you if I ran KDE, I'd use the Open Look theme. (Or maybe the Mac one.)
    ^~~^~^^~~^~^~^~^^~^^~^~^~~^^^~^^~~^~~~^~~^~
    ABORTED effort:
    Close all that you have.
  • Unfortunately it was in a magazine that I picked up while waiting in the lobby of Rockwell a number of months ago. It mentioned that Gtk had poor documentation and its feature set/functionality was more or less untested. But it gave it speed marks, as well as easy to use.

    I know there have been two other `On Paper' articles dealing or mentioning Gtk in non Linux publications. One explanation of the mindset might be a misinterpretation of the name. Some have called it the *Gnu* Tool kit, owing to the trememdous success of the libraries and development tools like gcc and glibc.

    I have nothing against QT.


    ^~~^~^^~~^~^~^~^^~^^~^~^~~^^^~^^~~^~~~^~~^~
    ABORTED effort:
    Close all that you have.
  • There don't seem to be any themes or styles with this release. Where'd they go?
  • Yes, WMaker is faster, and I believe it has a smaller memory footprint.
  • Uh, Sure, you get gnome and kde compliance in WindowMaker, then you want to go and run ATerm? It's now a contest (AFAIK) to mix as many X-WindowManager componants. Stay True to WindowMaker and use WMTerm or WTerm (why, when there are two very slick terminals, that support transparent backgrounds, and tinting in your choice of colors, and NeXT scrollbars, and less bloated than an ETerm, would you want anything else anyway?).

    BTW, Didn't ATerm come out like the next day after WTerm became publicly avaliable, and only looking a TINY bit diffrent in the code? Kinda like they started hacking from a pre-alpha reliese of wterm? No matter, Wterm has come a long way even this last week, so there is no reason for consirn.

    wterm -tint -tr -fg grey -bg blue -fn kates forever! (or at least this week)

  • wterm -tint -tr -fg grey -bg blue -fn kates
    Should be
    wmterm -tint -tr -fg grey -bg blue -fn kates

    I use wmterm personally, so, uh, sorry for all of you that tried to run that command...

    BTW, efnet #windowmaker seems a bit buzy, you all might want to try "./configure --help" on things before you ask questions. ;-)

  • What's been added to WindowMaker since 0.20.0? I reviewed that version on my Linux application review site (URL above) about six months ago and couldn't find any significant holes in its functionality then!

    (I wasn't so impressed with BlackBox, but I reviewed that, too.)
  • I would like to know what any of you have experienced with both KWM and WindowMaker. Is WM faster? Less of a resource hog? That in itself would be enough reason for me to jump ship and install WM 0.50 on my machine.
  • Well, maybe not ugly, but certainly uninspired. Granted, to get a truly cross-platform look and feel, there's a lot you can't do (OS/2 doesn't support anti-aliased fonts, for instance, and the Mac prior to 8.5 didn't either), but I still think they could do MUCH better. Looks like they need to hire a real graphic designer (rather than someone who's read the GIMP how-to).


    --
    Timur "too sexy for my code" Tabi, timur@tabi.org, http://www.tabi.org
  • This was supposed to be posted to the Mozilla Widgets forum. Argh!


    --
    Timur "too sexy for my code" Tabi, timur@tabi.org, http://www.tabi.org
  • Antecedents are your friends.
  • Please, cut the FUD. For one, Gnome's at 0.99.2 right now. Yeah, KDE's preparing 1.1. So what? They're version numbers. Look at features/functionality and you have more or less a draw on that score.

    StarOffice is KDE compliant. So? What's the big deal there? You can still use it with Gnome, and I'm sure they'll be adding Gnome-compliance once 1.0 is released.

    Every Gnome app has a KDE-compliant clone. Not quite; I can think of several very good Gnome apps without KDE equivalence, among them Pharmacy (a CVS client), Balsa (yes I know KDE has a mail app but it simply does not compare), and recent versions of Mozilla (QtZilla's development, last I heard, was halted; it was only ported in the first place to show off Qt's portability features).

    Now, on to windowmanagers. This is as irrelevant a point as your bit about StarOffice, but your facts are wrong so I'll bite. There are three KDE-compliant WM's: KWM, WM, and Blackbox (sort of). There are five Gnome-compliant WM's: E, IceWM, WindowMaker, SCWM, and Blackbox (actually, is Blackbox compliant? I never heard that). I won't count FVWM in this one since it's not true compliance, but as you can see Gnome has more WM support. It's irrelevant, but you had your facts wrong.

    Now, several distros ship with KDE. Let's see: SuSE does. LinPPC does but it also ships with Gnome. RedHat: Gnome. Debian: Gnome. I admittedly do not know about other distributions, so I hope someone else can do a better tally of these. FreeBSD ships with KDE, too. The point: who cares? This one's irrelevant as well (not FreeBSD, but the number of distro's shipping Gnome or KDE).

    And licensing issues? How does Qt's being Open-Source hurt Gnome any? Sorry; that one's not relevant either.

    Now, let's see: Is Gnome dead based on your arguments? Five of your points were completely irrelevant. That leaves only one valid point. So you basically just said "Gnome is dead because StarOffice is KDE-compliant." I'm sorry, but that seems more than a bit ludicrous.

    Why does either desktop environment have to die? Sure, KDE could stand some major improvements (particularly in aesthetics, though alternate windowmanagers help somewhat in that department) but it isn't bad. Sure, Gnome isn't done yet, but it's usable and functional. It's about choice, people. This said, I do wish the two would strive to be more compatible.
  • I'm having the same problem on a Slackware system, with gnome 0.99.2 tar.gz's.
  • The GNOME pager doesn't seem to work 100% correctly with WM 0.50 on my system. The pager will reflect workspace changes when I use the clip, but I can't clip on the pager buttons themselves to change workspaces. Anybody else have this problem? I have Redhat 5.2(intel), and installed the GNOME 0.99.1 RPMs. I should probably file a bug report, too...
  • Everything you mentioned except draging windows onto the virtual desktop is possible in fvwm2 (if I'm right in guessing you're talking about the pager). Fvwm2Pager can also show mini icons instead of the title names in the pager, which is nice because often the title is too long to read. You can use balloons (tooltips) which display the title when the mouse goes over the little windows.
    --
    Aaron Gaudio
    "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
  • Can't help you with the GNOME pager, but in fvwm2, I can swallow the FvwmPager into the panel. You won't get the window list but I use fvwm2's root menus for an alphabetically sorted window list anyways. The only other thing missing is that when you set your gtk theme, it won't affect the pager. Other than that, I find the FvwmPager more robust than the GNOME pager is right now anyways. Perhaps you can have similar luck with whatever WM has for a pager. Just make sure you have the pager running before the panel tries to swallow it.

    One caveat: if the pager dies, so does the swallowed app; I wish the "swallower" could be configured to stay around and wait for another pager to swallow, because if I restart fvwm2, I have to re-add the swallowed pager to the panel.
    --
    Aaron Gaudio
    "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
  • Windows 9x/Nt users who are feeling a little left out might want to check out www.litestep.net or floach.pimpin.net

    Litestep is a nifty Next/Afterstep clone which replaces the standard Explorer shell.

    Features include virtual desktops, dockable apps, popup menus, etc etc.

    Although still beta, it is pretty cool, a fair bit faster than explorer and (naturally) open source.

    floach.pimpin.net features news, etc on the above and various other win32 shell replacements (including the as-yet-unamed port of Enlightenment for windows and KDE-NT)
  • I would vastly prefer to use Linux @ work, but as I have to support Netware, NT & MS Office I am confined to running NT workstation.

    (Although I have snuck a Linux box in to help out our ageing UNIX system with some extra disk space via NFS - today the back room, tomorrow the world! :-)

    In the mean time, Litestep makes my MS-experience a good deal more tolerable.


  • EFX & LS (Score:1)

    by stu ( 3749 )
    Considering it is beta software,I have had very few problems with Litestep, although I have stopped using efx(efx is a titlebar changer which lets you 'theme' windows, much like many un*x window managers - also *way* beta) as it seems to break far too often for my liking.

    You can actually run Litestep and explorer in parallel although you lose the background menus and shortcuts.

    If all you want is the virtual desktops and/or wharf modules, you might also wantt o check out LSFloater (it'll be at floach.pimpin.net, probably) which allows wharf modules to run under any shell.
  • If you realy want to stay up to date, don't forget to get Xfree86 3.3.3.1, too ;)
  • WM 0.50.0 has an evil bug which makes it die instantly back to twm when you button-3-click any undocked program icon. (also mailed this info to the WM developer email address)
  • There's no longer the helpful ellipsis ("...") dock icon behavior - when I launch an app, instead of the icon going white and then the dots disappearing, I get a X (or sometimes a minimize symbol) on the top left of the docked icon, which then disappears - and there are no dots to disappear, even in a non-running icon.

    Myself, I don't like this behavior. In particular the dots are useful to see if a closed program has gotten wedged without properly closing, like Netscape often does. Also, it makes items with different functionality (raise/launch) look identical, which is bad UI design IMHO.
  • I just tried building WM (with the minipatch specified a couple messages shallower up the tree) on my home box, and it didn't go wierd on me this time. My work box is the one with the problem, and since my attempt to run Window Maker via secure-shell down a modem connection has just failed dismally, you will have to wait for monday to get a screen shot :-(
  • Well, there is a document on GNOME window manager compliance here [gnome.org]. I must admit that I haven't really read it. :-) I would guess that compliance consists of things like: The window manager shouldn't place icons on top of or behind the panel, & clicks on the root window should be passed to Gnome. This may be completely wrong. Feel free to correct me. :-)
  • You draw some very wrong conclusions.

    GNOME is at the version .30 KDE is preparing 1.1

    GNOME is at 0.99.2, preparing for 1.0. But if you take version numbers seriously, you probably need Windows 2000, cos it's way ahead of both KDE and GNOME.

    Latest StarOffice is KDE compliant

    What does this mean? (Hint: it isn't built with KDE widgets)

    Every GNOME application has a KDE compliant clone

    Every KDE application has a GNOME compliant clone.

    Several Linux distros are shiping with KDE and some even make KDE a default.

    Fair enough. KDE is more developed than GNOME is. No-one disputes that.

    QT licensing issue has been resolved ( as far as I know ).

    Mostly. Not everyone is happy with the new Qt license (though I don't personally have any major problems with it). It's more biased towards Troll Tech than other open-source licenses might be.

    Basically there are 3 KDE compliant WMs and there are AFAIK 3 GNOME compliant WMs

    4 GNOME compliant WMs - you forgot Enlightentment.

    By the way, I use (and prefer) KDE right now. But I don't believe GNOME is remotely dead, and I do want to see it succeed. Actually, what I really want to see is both KDE & GNOME interoperating via CORBA one day. And both being fully themable so (a) KDE & GNOME apps can be made to look and feel the same, and (b) they'll be able to interoperate - why shouldn't I be able to embed a Gnumeric spreadsheet in a KWord document, and have it all look like a NeXTStep application?

  • - Where is GNOME's killustrator?
    GYVE

    - Where is their KooBase?
    Got me there :-) KooBase looks pretty nice.

    - Where is their web browser?
    Well, I still prefer Netscape to kfm (1.1 might change that...) so that's not really an issue for me.

    - Where is their window manager? (just kidding)
    And where's the KDE equivalent for the GIMP? (just kidding)
  • How should one's .xinitrc be configured to get WM running under KDE? Is it just adding a /opt/kde/bin/startkde to your .xinitrc, and then editing /opt/kde/bin/startkde (as superuser) from exec kwm to exec wmaker?
  • I started with WM and switched to Blackbox for a while. BB is really fast and small and looks good, but eventually I switched back to Window Maker... I need my dockable apps, dammit! Also, I have a sweet-tooth (eye?) for eyecandy and love the NeXTstep look and the ability to pixmap the widgets.
    Advice for all Window Maker users who use Eterm... try Aterm! The pseudo-transparency works with WMSetBG. It'll do tiled pixmaps, gradients and solid colors! And it has the pretty NeXT-style scroolbar.
    Out.
  • WTerm? I hadn't heard of it or I would have tried it! Why wasn't it on Freshmeat? It's not even linked at the Window Maker site... no wonder. How can they expect people to use it when it has no exposure? Let me know where to get it, please.
  • I hope there is a way to optionally disable this KDE/Gnome compliancy stuff. Otherwise we are going to have a lot of bloated window managers every time a new "standard" comes along!
  • Yes, but it's also one of the most unstable pieces of software I've ever had the misfortune to use. The combination of that and eFX bought my Win95 box to its knees (though I guess that could just have been Win95...)
  • "Yes" seems like the best way. It's a lot tidier in the installation etc than any of the KDE Komponents (sic, probably). But then WM choice is almost as prone to flame-warring as editor choice (emacs! - sorry)

    Whatever works for you, d00d :)
  • Perhaps I should try it without eFX this time. It didn't help that the theme I was using didn't seem to dock windows properly and whenever I shrank them down I lost them completely! I might give it another chance, but to be honest I don't give a toss what Win95 looks like, it's only there so I can play games and run Cubase.
  • That's a damn good question. :) I'm guessing that maybe it will allow you to restore the state of apps when you return, but I donno... Can anyone point me to some info?
  • GNOME has a long way to go if you have to go through a process like that to install it.
  • i've noticed that since upgrading to WM 0.50.0, my cursor occasionally behaves sporadically. ie - i'll have netscape open and be cruising around slashdot when suddenly my cursor shoots up to the upper righthand corner of the screen and may or may not open a menuset or windowlist. has anyone else experienced this behavior?

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