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Window Maker 0.80 Released
An anonymous submitter points out that Window Maker, the window manager behind GNUStep, is now up to version 0.80. There is NEWS which describes some of the recent changes, as well as a Changelog.
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Maybe it's just me, and if so I apologize, but I have yet to see anything all that new from windowmaker.
http://www.santacruzbynight.com/index.shtml Santa Cruz By Night Vampire Larp
It kicks crufty Gnome's tail anyway. It and afterstep(when I'm feeling odd) are my desktops.
Plus, I've always liked higher version numbers
..I for one love the simplicity of WindowMaker - it was my WM of choice up until a year or so ago.. plus it always seemed to look really funky and unique when you got it skinned, and chucked in a few dockapps :)
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
I think they're 2 of the best Window Managers under Linux: small, flexible, fast and quite usables :-)
CU!
if this was a 1.0 release then for sure i'd probably be .80, with not THAT many improvements+features.
great to put the headline on the front page, but it's only
at
"I keep looking in the want-ads under 'revolutionary' but there don't seem to be any listings.. "
Linux has the potential to take over a small share of the enthusiast desktop marker. However standardizaion needs to occur and one window manager needs development to the point of having all the niceties that microsoft but without the bugs and secutriy holes. Which one will take over?
Or, you could accept that it's never going to happen and that it could really be better this way. All we really need is some standard way of setting icons and menus, and doing drag/drop.
Now that I've put all the flamebait in the title...
i cky. Widgets that just don't fit right if you resize or change your fonts (I blame this on bad coding - both in Windows Apps and in KDE Apps). A help system that looks nice, but pops up half off the screen if you're on an 800x600 laptop.
I'm quite impressed with KDE for general use, but damn is it slow to start and a little clunky to use. Even on a PIII/866 (current home box) with 512Mb memory, it's really not quick. There's also heaps of background tasks running providing 'services' to all those windows.
The end result is a slick user experience (once you're logged in), but also a more Windows feel - cutesy icons everywhere, preferences almost-all-in-one-place-but-don't-try-anything-tr
Enough about the off-topic stuff though, to Windowmaker.
I started using Windowmaker all of a couple of years ago (boo, hiss - before that amiwm a lot (reminded me of the Amiga, and was good over networked X sessions because it's so light weight - looked good on grey dumb-terminals too) - also twm and fvwm on VNC sessions, and on my Sony NWS-3410 which sort of worked, just, as an X terminal on good days.
Anyway, I've always been impressed with the simplicity of Windowmaker - dock apps have enough room to really show useful information (two wmbiff docks gives the 10 most commonly used mailboxes, mix in some fetchmail or isync and custom mutt command lines for each, and it's a one click mail solution). Back when I was using Linux as my primary desktop on the laptop, and Windows was just a VMware that got booted up for the occasional Word.doc, Windowmaker was a massive productivity boost over the others.
I still think that if I was using a Linux desktop for work rather than experimentation and games (ksame here I come!), Windowmaker would plain let me get more work done - KDE has too much kruft. With a desktop menu with 3 options:
rxvt
* exit
* save
- yep, that's it, and a docked netscape (now Opera or Mozilla) launcher, what more does one need? Not much for programming, mail (the wmbiffs above) and web. Any other tools can be launched from a handy shell quicker than navigating those menus. Sure it costs in time to learn, but it pays off bigtime in productivity, and the speed and simplicity of the WM means it's never in your way.
The improvement in Windowmaker I've enjoyed recently is that windows now automatically appear over blank bits of screen rather than over other windows. I really like that.
P.S - my config has everything in the top right corner, docks going down, minimised icons going across - 4 virtual screens (Main,Work,Net(Web),Personal) - Netscape/Opera auto-launches on Screen3, Email on Screen2 or Screen4 depending on Mailbox, rxvt's on current screen. All is happy.
It's only been, what, four years since Window Maker's initial release? And to think that things have already sped along to version 0.80!
Folks, this must be the most combed-through, finished and complete 2.5 megabyte tarball in existance. A mastery of software engineering and code.
I can't wait for 1.0, which should be coming along as early as 2003 or early 2004.
Let's hear it for GNUstep, and the most feature-depleted, slowly-developed window manager of all time - Window Maker 0.80!
Anyone know how well this thing works in HURD?
-
Kid-proof tablet..
Go use Windows XP.
Unix doesn't suit you.
Who cares what the version number is? Window Maker has been perfectly stable and usable for years.
It's only good that they don't add too much bloat + unnecessary features. I like it the way it is - simple, fast, light-weight, and really good-looking if you select a nice theme.
Nowadays I prefer the latest KDE on my main machine, but with older computers (say 500MHz or so...) wmaker really kicks ass.
I think you'll find that upgrading your measly ~50MB of RAM to, shall we say, 128MB will boost the performance of KDE quite a bit...
There is NEWS which describes some of the recent changes
Actually, that's GNUS. After all, we mustn't ignore the 15 years of hard work by the GNU Project, which has made all existence possible.
What's this major obsession over 1.0 releases?
I would hardly call WindowMaker "feature-depleted". You know, before I used WM, I used fvwm2. Yes, FVWM 2.x. And much to my surprise, this 0.5x (which it was at the time) was much cooler and better window manager than FVWM2. (No uebercustomizable outlook, but it was simple, just as fast, and at least the configuration was about million times easier, plus theme support was *much* more mature...)
I don't care about the program's version number, as long as it works. =)
This is a far more efficient and speedy window manager. It can easily be integrated with KDE and Gnome. Its minimalistic and very clean.
why go with a bloated windowmanager?
and you're married you can call it widow-maker as well.
I did. Freaked the crap out of me until I realised what was going on... (Why Christmas Eve though? Or does it start even earlier?)
(This was in 0.65, as compiled by those nice people at Slackware, but I assume it'll be in the default version of WindowMaker shipped with other distributions)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
wmflame, the system load monitor.
With all the talk lately about how cryptic and information-less the Linux kernel changelogs are, I just now noticed how refreshingly descriptive the WM changelogs are (and have always been).
I agree. I use Gnome on my main desktop, but my poor little P133 laptop is feeling a lot better with something lighter. I'm continuously waffling between WindowMaker and XFce on that machine, and I don't really see me decide for one over the other in the near future, but we'll see how this new release stands up.
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
"Linux" won't ever standardize on anything (sorry to say). Hopefully a majority of the community WILL standardize on one basic version of a desktop environment, and office suite, etc. If there's a 'defacto' standard, more people will use it. Sorry, but I don't WANT people to have to learn lots of stuff *before* using a system just to be able to make a choice.
No one is saying to take away choices - you can go keep running sawfish all you want. But having a pronounced 'standard' will help encourage people to learn and support that standard more. The more users, the more demand for my services. If Linux, which I've invested a lot of time in learning, always remains a 'niche' player, future job prospects will be less than optimal. Let all the newbies in - that's more work for us later. Look at how many 'newbie' type Windows users there are that know just enough about a system to screw it up, then call for help. Who do they call? People that know and support Windows, not Linux. If more people are encouraged to try Linux on the desktop (because of a default - and usable - 'standard') then the more secure the job market will be for people with solid Linux skills.
creation science book
I've just upgraded to Linux From Scratch 3.1 (which I can highly recommend by the way) and I was not looking forward to compiling and installing all of Gnome and/or KDE from scratch. I even got halfway through compiling Gnome 1.4 before I tripped over the fact that a key system library needs the new Gtk+ which doesn't want to run with many other Gtk+ apps I have. Anyway, out of curiosity I grabbed WindowMaker because it was a) small and b) needed very few dependencies - the basic image libraries I think was all and since I had those I needed nothing more.
I'm not going elsewhere anytime soon. WM is fast, easily configurable and almost as pretty as E without chewing half the CPU. And to echo the sentiments of Bronster, it doesn't get in your way.
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
GNUStep, all nice and shiny, but one most missing feature fron {Open|Next}Step is the terminal with the search capability! When are we going to get it?
All of these slim WMs are good for 486s, but on a 1ghz CPU, or even my 400mhz cpu, speed really isnt the issue because its fast enough. Then it comes down to which interface has the most features, and is the easiest to use.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
What I don't get is the obsession with 1.0 release numbers. Is it a bad thing that a project has matured and can definately be considered more than a 1.0 release?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
KDE isnt all that quick thats why i dont use it.
But enlightenment, has tons of good features, Its very fast, its very stable, Its my favorite.
WMaker has nice features too, but when it comes to usability thats a completely diffrent story. Dont forget the ability to totally customize your interface, nothing compares to E. E even supports the latest features of Xrender, really I think E is cool.
KDE is ok but its too much like Windows.
Gnome is another Windows clone, just not as fancy as KDE.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Do we still need wsetfont, a small utility to configure fonts for various languages?
Since font specification of Window Maker is based on Latin-1 and not internationalized, non-Latin-1 people need to invoke wsetfont to display our native language on the window titles.
I tried to write a patch, like I wrote a patch for TWM, Sawfish, IceWM, and so on. (Thus, all we need to do is to set locale [i.e., LANG, LC_CTYPE, or LC_ALL variable] for these window managers to handle i18n characters.) However, it was difficult to write a patch because Window Maker is made from two parts of core and widgets. I had no idea how to communicate the mode (XFontStruct mode or XFontSet mode) between the core and widgets. Are there anyone who are willing to try this problem?
(I wonder how many non-Latin-1 people live in the Slashdot community.)
There are already debian packages in .. sweeet.
unstable
There are only 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary and those who don't.
It HAS a standard WM. KDE.If people want to use Gnome, as long as its enough like Windows, its standard. Windows is standard, copy Windows and you have a standard WM. If you want a standard WM, use Gnome or KDE. There you go.
Theres no reason why there can only be ONE standard WM. 2 is better because they compete. 2 is not going to confuse people, because people once had the choice to pick from IE or Netscape.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
GNUStep is the future, forget KDE and GNOME, they are doomed by their implementation languages, not suitable for real OO programing, and the making of real components (KOM like COM is a hack). We already have an standard to follow (OpenStep), and the OSX applications can be backported. Once the GNUStep folks reach completion, then a real UNIX'y desktop will appear, and not another Windows-wannabe.
I still have not figured out how to get rid of these silly app icons that pop up for every program you open. The only way I figured out how is to right click the apps title bar, click attributes, click the menu for Application Specific and put a check in No Application Icon.
This has bugged me for years.
thanks a lot folks for the effort!
after using kde eversince, i shifted to windowmaker about an year ago! and it has grown on me. the shift was particularly because of the speed of kde, and me getting more comfortable with the bash prompt. and i havn't regretted the move at all.
what i like in wm is 1. speed, 2. use of very minimum resources 3. minimalistic approach. you get just as much as you would require in a normal session. nothing more nothing less!
Though I didn't really notice any big differences in WM 0.80.0, it's still good to see that development on this project is still going on. I've tried KDE and Gnome, and kinda liked them both, except for two things: speed and lightness. I'm now all the way back to WindowMaker, and runs brilliantly on my AMD380. My PC know feels faster than ever. For example, if a friend of mine tries to surf the net, rip a CD to mp3 s and plays music with Winamp on his 1GHz WinME machine, the responsiveness of the computer drops dramatically. On my machine, I can do the same things without a hassle, music never skips, etc.
The only thing I miss when running WM, is a decent filemanager. For diskoperations, etc. I'm happily running MC in a terminal, but when I want to browse through a CD and open up photo's or mp3's "on the fly" I'm rather stuck. Konqueror and Nautilus are too heavy for me. Has anyone got a lighter alternative?
ROX is a fantastically great, small, and fast filemanager, http://rox.sourceforge.net/
Very cool, has most of the features I liked of Nautilus/Konqueror, but makes my AMDK6-2 400 work *so* much faster..... Give it a try, really great project.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
While not as skinny as blackbox
Windowmaker is a nice compromise
between size and functionality.
When I used to use gnome and tried
kde they attenuated the response of
the system too much. Although my
belief is viv la difference
...was the day i managed to actually crash it, while doing slightly dumb things with preferences. Up popped a dialog box informing me that Windowmaker had suffered a segmentation fault, and asking me if i would like it to restart itself. (and that is the ONLY time i ever managed to crash it, unlike, say, Enlightenment or Sawfish)
That is the most graceful crash handling i have ever encountered. Beautiful! I've been a loyal user ever since.
Hand me that airplane glue and I'll tell you another story.
How many CPU's do you have? I'm using Wmmon+SMP on my Dual-CPU machine.
Slagborr
My Linux desktop experience dates back to RedHat 5.1, when Windowmaker and Afterstep were both part of the default install. While I always admired the NeXT (the cube is the coolest machine ever), I never had the chance to spend any time using one. I would like to know which WM is a closer approximation of Nextstep's GUI.
For maximum compatability with current software, I have been using Gnome, Enlightenment with an OpenStep Theme, and a GTK OpenStep theme. All of that bloat really eats the resources. It would be nice to run a lighter WM and only call Gnome and KDE into memory as needed.
I have a question for people using AfterStep or WM nowdays - how do you stay compatable with KDE and Gnome based software?
I'll admit to being a newbie to WMs. Most of my Linux work has been shell access only. But I'm trying to put together a experimental desktop system out of some spare parts and would like to have more than a single console available.
I'd like to find a feature comparison of various popular WMs. I want to find which is the best WM for me. Does anyone know where I could find such a thing?
I don't want to start a flamewar. This is an honest question. "Best" is a highly subjective term. But I'd like to find one that's best for me, because that's what matters.
Some will probably answer with the question "Well what are you looking for in a WM?" so that they can make a recommendation. I don't know. That's why I'd like to find a good comparison. I might see a feature listed that I hadn't thought of. There are just too many WMs out there to do all the research myself. If push comes to shove I'll probably just pick one, install it, and use it. I'd prefer to make an informed decision.
Constitutionally Correct
Window Maker is like Enlightenment old and tiresome...They take too long that no one cares anymore about their projects
There's a nice surprise in WindowMaker, but you can only see it on the Christmas eve. Take your system date back to December 24, then run wmaker, right click on the desktop then pick "Info Panel" from the "Info" menu to see the egg.
I only tested this with version 0.70 but I think it works with 0.80 too.
Petru
You don't get it, do you? :)
News related to the window manager favored by slashdot crew stand above everything else, and deserve special attention of working masses
Just try searching news archive and you'll see
that E and WM received order of magnitude more news items than any other wm.
Property of AfterStep Window Manager.
Slashdot definitely sucks monkey testicles lately.
A new release of WindowMaker??!?! Wowwy Zowie! Who fuckin' cares?!?!?! IT SUCKS!
Some companies don't care about Web defacement!!!! What a fuckin' news flash! Unless it's your own company, who gives a flyin' cow shit? And if it is your own company, and your site sucks, maybe it'll get people to visit the fuckin' pit.
The commercialization of the Internet??!?! Fuckin' christ! When did that happen?! Holy shit, this is news to me! I could have sworn it happened about ten fuckin' years ago shortly after the birth of the WWW, but what the fuck do I know?!
No more sweaty mouse hands?!?!?! Cool! Just when I thought that I was a complete fuckin' degenerate playing games 'til my hands sweat and cramp, when I should be working or something, now I know that others share my problem, and life seem so much fucking better now.
thank you.
If you run X on a machine with 32 megs of ram and a small processor (P75+), you don't *NEED* to run TWM or Blackbox. Windowmaker runs quite nicely on a config that small, and has more features than both combined.
Besides the small memory footprint Windowmaker also features icon sized programs that sit at the bottom of your screen, called "docapps" which are usually monitoring programs. They take up very little space, and can provide tons of operational information at a glance. If you run windowmaker check out WMMon, WMCalClock, WMNet and WMApm (if you have a laptop).
Success is as dangerous as failure, hope as hollow as fear.
if you have microsoft windows, gnome or kde, go read and enjoy your new workstation...
Windoze not found: (C)heer, (P)arty or (D)ance
windowmaker banners nice workstation
Windoze not found: (C)heer, (P)arty or (D)ance
does this have KDE 2.x support yet?
I'm spoiled by using kicker and kdesktop =)
I'll look at Window Maker when it supports the NET_WM standard, and not before.
eww GNOME. Go fuck yourself, you little swedish lund cunt licker.
GNUSTEP rox all!
The irony.
All we really need is some standard way of setting icons and menus, and doing drag/drop.
This isn't conceptually dissimilar to what I said, yet I got beat with the double troll stick. Amusing.
I'll amend one of my life priciples to read:
'Never argue with a fool, a woman, a drunkard, and Slashdot Orthodoxy'.
-1 Offtopic
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
And for today (27/12/2001), clicking the icon in the info panel gives you a short but cheerful message.
You forgot to mention that fvwm2 (at least, in all the incarnations I've seen) is rather ugly, whereas WM has a kind of elegance to it. It looks nice, and doesn't clutter things up.
It's nice. I alternate between KDE, BlackBox, and WM, depending on mood and the phase of moon.
Look you bitter piece of shell, this isn't a democracy (no bad thing) so don't expect it to be. If they like some software they'll put it on the front page. Sure, you're right, but get over it already.
I moved from sawfish/GNOME to KDE to WindowMaker over the course of this year.
It makes you realise what a pig KDE is in terms of resources. GNOME is faster than KDE but isn't anywhere near to KDE as far as 'Desktop Environment' functionality goes.
WindowMaker needs a fair bit of work put in before all the icons/miniwindows for your apps behave as you want them .
It is not immediately clear how to suppress multiple application icons for apps like xmms, or to override application icons supplied by the apps themselves like NEdit. Nor is it obvious how to actually dock an app like WMClock
Once you figure this out (and i think 0.8 has some extra features in this department), i find WindowMaker to be the most useful desktop environment available on Linux.
Currently, i use OS X primarily, and Window Maker absolutely blitzes it for speed, even on a lower-specced machine (P3-500 vs. G4-550) I also run Window Maker on XDarwin for X apps on the Powerbook.
I don't quite know why a minor upgrade to this package warrants a Slashdot story, but i might as well take this opportunity to thank the WindowMaker team for making my computing life easier.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
I have been an faithful WM follower since around 0.20. I still use it on all the slower machines. But I switched to Enlightenment (higly tuned to have the feel of WM) because of the missing support for Xinerama in WM.
... Don't get me wrong - I love WM but after the 100th window that popped up half in a monitor half in the other and the 100th maximized window that took both display - I gave up.
:( )
Today, most of the videocards come with dual monitor support. It's easy to put the old 14-15" next to the shiny new 17-19" one. But using WM in this setup is a pain
I want my Xinerama (and I don't have enough coding capabilities to add it myself and contribute the patch
1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
Does anyone care to share their experiences using KDE as the desktop environment and WindowMaker as the window manager? For example, how is it done and what visual elements of each show up on the screen? Does one still get to enjoy KDE's antialiasing of fonts under this method? Thanks :-)
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Try FileRunner (yes thats one word) simple MC clone written in TCL/TK with a built in FTP client thats rather powerful. Has quick links to useful operations like uncompressing TGZ volumes and MKDIR etc. I beleive you can configure file assoications for automatic aplication launching. The best thing about FileRunner for me is as long as I have been using Linux (about 3 years) it has gone up only 0.01 in version numbers, that kind of stability is nice for me.
uh, no, fvwm2 is NOT ugly because it is uberconfigurable. at different times, I've made it look and FEEL like NeXTish, KDE, OS2, etc...
windowmaker's theme support is much much less, but is also much much easier.
anyways, I prefer blackbox (on my slow box), and kde (on my fast box). never liked windowmaker much.
It would be nice, if for things that require a filename (ie, appicon), the configuration boxes would be xdnd enabled. Put this in throughout the wm, and then I would have a truly integrated environment between a filemanager (ROX is the one I use) and windowmaker. X direct save would be an added bonus.
Rox
Emelfm. I love this filemanager. Search for it on freshmeat.
I used to use this filemanager. I switched to emelfm for some reason or another, but I can't really remember why. Hmmm. I'm going to have to install this again and check it out.
I really could do without the icons. I'd be happy if I could simply share data between applications.
As it is, even trying to paste text from a web browser into a text editor is a more difficult task than I would like (on any platform, not just unices).
Ion is very different from any other window manager I've used. It's based on pwm, and operates by dividing the screen into frames (just like you can do in vim 6.0 and in emacs). This allows for easily switching between windows using just the keyboard. To a new user, this will almost certainly seem very odd (particularly since it's impossible to move a "window" around the screen; you can only move it to a different frame).
This is a very cool concept, imo, but it takes a while to learn.
http://www.students.tut.fi/~tuomov/ion/
WindowMaker has really been demoted to the 3rd choice desktop interface by many distrobutions and developers.
Distros largely say something like "choose kde, gnome/sawfish or windowmaker" - when did you last see windowmaker mentioned first in that line-up when installing??
It is a pity that the distrobutions that push the "taskbar" approach (and default themes! as previous posts have said that other distro's do not have to display a Windows style theme).
Unfortunatly such moves to keep pushing the "taskbar" style interface to newbies are trying to emulate rather than inovate far too much. Is the Windows style inferface really that good? Do we need to give newbies a homogenised and familiar windowsy approach?
If linux is being marketed as an alternative why are such interfaces being pushed as the defaults?
Are we conceding that we have no better ways than to emulate? I dont mean to provoke anybody saying that one way is better than another but i'm sure you all agree that they are interesting questions.
Anyway take another approach - is faster necessarily better? Would some people not prefer an interface that is slower loading but more graphically intense with animations and such?
The media sometimes protrays linux as being faster in every way which is not always true depending on how it is set up and indeed not always the best option for certain specific implementations (as there are many other criteria to address). For some people a slow to load KDE is ok bacause it fulfills their needs. The solution is probably to give many choices.
I started with choices of WindowMaker and fvwm and a few other more spartan interfaces like twm etc.
I really wonder would I ever have the same opinion of Linux if I had been given a default of KDE or GNOME/Sawfish etc. Another interesting question to ponder on....
I tried looking at a screenshot on windowmakers site, to see if it will ever catch up to the interface of Windows or OSX .. and I got this error...
2002: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/tmp/mysql.sock' (146)
I guess mySQL just can't support the stress on the server, even at 2am on a thursday night.
haha..
I really have a hard time finding ONE good windowmaker theme, I looked all over largo's site, and wm.themes.org, wm.classic.themes.org, any suggestion?
GNU screen or FVWM, not a poor clone of AfterStep maintained by Alfredo Kojima.
IMHO there were some pretty nice themes in themes.org before it was fucked up... (Not sure if they are available at wm.classic.themes.org)
Just take a theme with nice colors, fonts etc., change the background picture to something from digitalblasphemy.com and you're all set.
And its not like ram and cpu cycles are something we ever fully tap out anymore, any extra ram or resources is sitting not being used by anything most likely.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac