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Sun Drops Sawfish for Metacity
Cardhore writes: "According to this article, Sun's and Wipro's developers are now working on Metacity, instead of Sawfish. Metacity and Sawfish are two window managers for the GNOME desktop, and Sun has decided to use Metacity over Sawfish for GNOME 2. This decision has been based on issues such as accessibility, maintainability of the code [1], documentation, multi-head support and a general eagerness from the community to commit to Metacity in the future." Here's a brief description of Garret LeSage's experience with Metacity, which is described here as a "boring window manager for the adult in you." Anyone with Metacity screenshots, please post below :)
(It doesn't seem to have a web page yet.)
http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~jwillcox/desktop.png
Yanno, I used to think Sun was stupid, over-priced crap of a unix machine -- but then I have now seen their high-end boxen in a production enviroment and they are damned nifty. Hot-swappable drives and all; maybe not the best unix around, and maybe not cheap, but their not overly bad.
There's a couple screenshots here: http://www.lucidus.uklinux.net/metacity/
Found at http://www.sunshineinabag.co.uk/
--sean
According to the garnome site, it's pronounced matacity like "opacity". That's cool.
The reason those are big in the screen shot is to show off the new SVG icon support in Gnome 2. That stands for Scalable Vector Graphics in case you are wondering, so they should be very easy to scale to any size you want :)
afterstep used to have a similar feature (maybe it still has it? haven't used it in a while), which I loved, and was one of the things I missed the most when migrating to WindowMaker. I've since become used to WindowMaker's "one-dimensional" paging which is also pretty good; I still use AfterStep's ctrl+arrow convention for switching (WM's default is shift+ctrl+arrow).
On the topic, and with the complaints of no GUI tool to configure Metacity, I just though I would point everyone to a piece of software that I wrote called Metacity-Setup. Im currently working on getting it a little more friendly (its flawed to be sure) but it does basic stuff nicely.
i ty -setup/
http://www.gnome.org/softwaremap/projects/metac
It's not Sun vs the GNOME community. Metacity is a WM that uses GTK2.0; it is also a lot smaller and faster than the LISPing bloat of Sawfish.
There's been a dissatisfaction with Sawfish and a considerable push to move to Metacity for ages - long before Sun even became involved in GNOME. I doubt you'll find much in the way of opposition to this.
Let's string him up for failing to mention the other very important wm that runs with Gnome.
What is your Slash Rating?
Were you running xinerama? wm's need it for decent window placement w/ multiheads. See http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Xinerama-HOWTO.html , Specifically http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Xinerama-HOWTO-7.html . If you are, sorry for the condescension.
Is Sun going to become a reseller and drop its last products?
Um... at last count, sun is selling at least 17 (!) models of Sparc-based servers, and four different Sparc-based workstations. They have six products in the Cobalt line. I don't think you're quite right when you refer to Sun's Sparc-based systems as "its last products."
In other words, no.
Excuse me while I crack up.
Has anybody actually considered how useless a screenshot of a window manager is these days? Upon looking at that image, anyone familiar with X window managers should realize that the only parts of the shot drawn by the window manager are just the frames around the two windows. Assuming (I'm guessing) the window manager supports themes in some manner, it's basically a Gnome screenshot. Nautilus, the panel, etc.
While we're all addicted to screenshots, in the case of window managers, a comprehensive feature list would've been infinitely more useful than anything a picture can show.
Next thing you know, people will be asking for screenshots of DBMS's.
from the sawfish-works-nicely-though dept.
HA! Two *serious* reasons why Sawfish doesn't really "work nicely":
1) I won't link directly, because in this case, it's a Bad Thing(TM), but go check Bugzilla for Sawfish... it's a nasty sight.
2) Ever looked at the configuration dialogs for that beast!? They're INSANE. Let me give you an example. This is an actual preference in Sawfish: "Offset (%) from left window edge when warping pointer" Pardon my shouting, but WHO THE FSCK WANTS TO CONFIGURE THAT?! What's so wrong about just setting a sane default and leaving it at that? (ie: the way Metacity does it)
That said, for day to day use, Sawfish is ok, but it's got huge issues and it needs to *go*. While it'll throw things into some turmoil, I have to admit I'm pretty happy that Sun made this decision.
The Free desktop that Just Works
This is particularly a problem for sawfish; not only is it a complex, niche codebase involving fairly obscure stuff (X) that not as many people have experience with, it is also in Lisp, which narrows down the number of potential hackers even more. Nothing wrong with Lisp, mind you, just not as many proficient lisp hackers in the community as there are C hackers. And that does make a difference to community supported projects.
IAAL,BIANLY
Own the desktop? Knows it's place?
Excuse me, but do you even KNOW what the goals of the Enlightenment project were/are? Enlightenment was NEVER meant to be "just" a window manager. As far back as DR13 Rasterman was planning on making a desktop -shell-, not a window manager. The whole Redhat/GNOME fiasco was a side-track to that, but now things are RIGHT back on track, where they originally were.
If anything, Enlightenment was a bad fit for GNOME simply because it was NEVER MEANT to be "just" a window manager. I'm glad they split with GNOME...E is going to become something quite different than your traditional desktop (thank god...and it's about time).
And as for Redhat, let's just say there were more politics involved in their decision to dump E (and let's not forget Raster's less-than-happy departure).
sawfish has options to change this. i believe there's bunch of defaults (windows, motif, next, macos)
"There are some hacks to get focus-follows-mouse, but a lot of apps don't work well with it."
Start->Settings->Control Panel->Tweak UI->Mouse Tab->Check "Activation Follows Mouse (X-Mouse)". Semi-supported by microsoft, should work with 99.9% of all windows and apps. Hardly a "hack".
Don't have TweakUI? Go here
"The task bar."
Click and drag the top of the taskbar down to the bottom. It disappears. Or turn on auto-hide.
"when the IDE/Word/whatever opens a bunch of subwindows "
Since Office2000, office applications have created new windows for the window manager to handle for each document open. In Excel for example, Tools Menu->Options->View Tab->check Windows in Taskbar. The fact that older applications do this stems from the GUI design of Windows 3.1, where window management sucked, and people only ran 1 application at a time anyway.
"Clippy"
He's dead. Why kick a dead horse?
Windows window management has come of age. Looks like you dumped it back in '95 and never looked back.
I installed the Ximian Gnome 2 snapshots on a PII 333 machine w/ 64 MB RAM. I know it sounds like suicide, but when I used metacity instead of sawfish and didn't use nautilus to draw the desktop (I don't use desktop icons anyway) it ran pretty snappy.
Well, first I killed nautilus (duh!), noted it was still a little slow, and decided to try out Metacity. I use blackbox normally on my other slow machine, but I wanted something Gnome complaint. Metacity fit the bill perfectly since it uses the same libs as everything else. I've been using the thinice theme for Gnome2 as well.
Oh, and you can find metacity themes at sunshine in a bag.
Metacity has been in the Ximian Gnome 2 snapshots for around two weeks. (or was that about a week?)
add a binding
"Send to previous workspace" i usually bind that to Alt+Control+Left Arrow key. same thing with send to next workspace using the right arrow key.
also i have bindings to send a window to a specific workspace. use the "Send to workspace" binding and enter the workspace number and whatever binding you want. works great!
"I keep looking in the want-ads under 'revolutionary' but there don't seem to be any listings.. "
Well, I'll just say it: Sawfish is, in my reasonably informed opinion, a well-designed, maintainable program. I read the documentation and looked at the code in order to make some changes of my own (which I never finished...), and I was generally impressed.
So, while I haven't seen enough evidence to be sure, I strongly suspect someone at Sun is afraid of Lisp.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
Cool there boy. Lisp is already on the system...its also on your system. At least guile, probably umb-scheme, librep, and emacs.
Lisp rules. Get over it.
Crux is ported. I'm currently using it. Works great, looks nice. This Metacity is compiled from source obtained from GNOME CVS, I'm not sure if the latest released tarball includes any themes, though. In Meta city CVS repository there're 8 different themes.
2002-05-13 John Harper * sawfish/wm/gnome/integration.jl: admit defeat and go back to loading xterm module all the time
Nah, Sun just wants to avoid the complexity of the project and get a WM that does the basics (and just the basics, cos Sawfish does too, but is also highly expandable, so can do more than the basics). Sawfish is also famous for crappy defaults and configuration strings, both of which can be fixed if people agree a bit instead of pushing unconsistency and weird phrasing.
For example, until recently eveyone complained that the menu was slow too appear... cos Harper took ages to accept that the var that keeps the menu running always should default to on, and leave those with few RAM set it to a timeout.
Dialogs (cycle window, quote event, etc) are crappy, but there are improvements (search Merlin and Sawfish in Google, or search for the Sawfish Wiki)... maybe next century they will be accepted in core.
Not in the context of your comment.
Scheme, as a language, is defined as properly tail recursive, and defines iterative constructs in terms of tail-recursive ones, whereas most other Lisp implementations (specifically Common Lisp and Emacs Lisp) are not defined this way, and do not do so. Since implementations may not eliminate tail calls, you definitely need to use iterative constructs if you want your code not to blow up in your face.
In fact Common Lisp has one of the most powerful iterative constructs I know - the LOOP macro.