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 :)

Comments

Where to find it ...

[charlie]

You can find Metacity here.

(It doesn't seem to have a web page yet.)

Metacity and GNOME2

[Snorp]

http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~jwillcox/desktop.png

Couple of screenshots

[dizco]

There's a couple screenshots here: http://www.lucidus.uklinux.net/metacity/

Found at http://www.sunshineinabag.co.uk/

--sean

Metacity-Setup might be of some interest

[plastercast]

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.

http://www.gnome.org/softwaremap/projects/metaci ty -setup/

Re:Multihead support?

[SanLouBlues]

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.

Re:Reason for the switch.

[luge]

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.

Re:Code Maintainability?

[The Pim]

When they say "unmaintainability", this is code-word for "Programmed in Lisp", rather than "Programmed in a sloppy messy spaghetti-like fashion"

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.