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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 :)
Metacity and Sawfish are two window managers for the GNOME desktop
/., where potentially-unfamiliar terms are defined. Time after time I've encountered some unexplained reference in an article and wondered, "Am I the only person who doesn't know what this is?"
Thanks for explaining, and I hope this is the start of a new policy on
(It doesn't seem to have a web page yet.)
I do like the way metacity places dialog boxes though. They are placed horizontally centered and just below the top of their parent window, somewhat like a MacOS X dialog.
I just grokked this off of the gnome mailing list here.
> Btw: Why there has not been any updates for sawfish lately?
Rumor has it that John was employed by Apple and that as part of the employment contract he's no longer allowed to develop sawfish.
So there you have it! Before you start flaming back and forth about what's better, think about the logistics behind using a WM that's no longer being maintained.
A musician without the RIAA, is like a fish without a bicycle.
http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~jwillcox/desktop.png
I started using metacity two weeks ago or so, and I'm fairly pleased. I really liked sawfish, but felt it was time to try something new.
Pro: easy to set up (not a whole lot of options to choose from, really), fast (much speedier than sawfish), and largely with sensible defaults for everything.
Con: I miss a few settings, like the ability to remember window size and position. Also, lazy focus only changes focus and does not raise the newly focused window.
On the whole, a good, solid windowmanager that really feels lean and efficient.
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
There's a couple screenshots here: http://www.lucidus.uklinux.net/metacity/
Found at http://www.sunshineinabag.co.uk/
--sean
I want to be able to do almost nothing, but FAST!
You are not the customer.
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
Metacity saved our business. Maybe it will save slashdot, too
Let's get one thing clear; metacity is not Jesus, allright?
And if it took a new window manager to save your company, then I need its name. I'm worried I might be a stockholder.
:-)
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
A while back Slashdot started linking any potentially unfamilar terms to everything2, however this raised the ire of several who felt that this was an abuse of the Everything2 service (which didn't make an awful lot of sense as that's specifically what the service is for)
Could programming language ignorance or bigotry be at least partially at the root of this? Probably not, but one wonders anyway.
The world needs one full-assed solution, not 400 half-assed solutions. That's the eternal problem with free software / open source development. Quit bickering about which one is better and which one to use; pick one, stick with it, and get it done.
I absolutely agree with you. I get so discouraged when I run into things like the 90 items listed under "Window Managers" on Freshmeat, and not a one of 'em especially useful.
That's the problem with the current state of open source development. Rather than putting 10,000 brains on one project, you put one brain each on 10,000 projects. Net result: almost zero result for a vast amount of work.
Maybe the only way to get programmers organized is to get a bunch of them in one place and wrap a company around them.
When they say "unmaintainability", this is code-word for "Programmed in Lisp", rather than "Programmed in a sloppy messy spaghetti-like fashion", or "The primary developer is no longer working on it". Most likely, the Wipro programmers don't have much experience with lisp/scheme/rep, and a decision was made to dump it for Metacity, which happens to be written in a language they speak (c, that is).
If you read the metacity source code, at least on earlier releases, Havoc had written things like "I won't implement idea X, because it is crackrock. Tough luck." Things like making metacity play nicely with XMMS. Of course, this was when it was his pet project and not being considered by Sun/Wipro. One wonders if there will be a Sun fork of the project, or if Havoc will turn over development or make compromises that Sun will inevitably require.
While I think metacity is a pretty cool project, Sun's decision is probably one of these management mistakes that have been talked about in all the sociology of software development books. Think of all the little bugs that have been sorted out over the years in Sawfish that will have to be solved again. Things like maintaining focus of window when changing desktops using keybindings; or dual-head setups that have different monitor resolutions while using multiple workspaces and desktops. These things will all have to be sorted out again.
Frankly me and probably 99% of other GNOME users don't give a crap what WM they're running as long as it doesn't get in the way of GNOME. It should be as unobtrusive as possible and limit its features to window-manager-y things.
I suppose E would be a good fit if you didn't want to run GNOME, or could put up with the bloat, or wanted to run kewl gigeresque desktops with metal knobs and shit, but for the rest of who just want to run some GNOME apps, then Sawmill is a perfectly usable and functional WM.
Ultimately I'd like to NOT KNOW what WM I'm running. I don't really care that much as long as it moves windows around and is reasonably skinnable. If Metacity is a move in that direction then that fine by me. The sooner I don't need to know what WM is running the better.
I think there's some missing the point going on here. From Sun's perspective (indeed, from a sysadmin's perspective), the lack of its own setup tools, relying on a command interface to change settings is a plus.
Metacity gives GNOME a chance to address one of its manageability flaws, the confilct between a desktop environment and the window manager. Which controls wallpaper? Screensavers? Why are there separate themes and theme settings interfaces for window chrome and the window contents?
It's because some power users high up in GNOME and window manager development--who usually aren't responsible for any machines beyond their own personal ones--like the flexibility of mixing and matching, and like pushing the bounds of what each component of their system can do. So overlapping--and conflicting--features get built.
This isn't the end of the world, but it does make a GNOME system more unwieldy than it has to be. KDE can run with several window managers, but it comes with one of its own that leaves configuration matters to KDE. GNOME hasn't had this yet. Enlightenment, sawmill and sawfish have been progressively better fits, but Sun and others who are moving to Metacity probably see it as a simpler route to getting a decent (GTK+ 2, anti-aliasing, multihead, accessibility-enabled) window manager seamlessly tied into GNOME than revamping Sawfish--and subsuming all of its configuration into GNOME--would be.
GNOME with Sawfish is a much tougher sell to a simplicity-minded CDE administrator than GNOME with Metacity will be, I suspect.
I'll agree that translucence and themability are fluff. I might be able to envision an actual use for translucence if I thought about it long enough, but it'd be a real corner case.
But...
Things that suck in Windows window management:
Sumner
rage, rage against the dying of the light
For goodness sake, what problem do translucent windows solve? The need to see what's behind your xterm while simultaneously rendering it unreadable?
Can't argue with that. I like plain light-grey-on-black xterms. Easy to read.
I'm sorry, but it's true. I don't care if you can make windows "roll up" into the title bar and you think it looks cool - what problem does that solve that wouldn't be handled better by minimising the window and showing it in the taskbar? Really, I'd be interested if someone could tell me the advantage.
Ummm, ok. Not everybody likes the whole "taskbar" idea. When I'm on a Windows box, I frequently have so many windows open that the taskbar is utterly unusable (takes me 30 seconds just to hover over icons and find which one I'm after). On my X desktop, I have no taskbar or anything like it -- I use sawfish with no desktop envorinment. Just gkrellm in the corner of my left-hand monitor, a tiny pager in the bottom left (4 virtual desktops X 3 monitors == lots of room :), and the windows themselves. If I have too much open and the windows are overlapping, just click on the desktop and I get a nice, easy to read menu with everything grouped by application or class. It really saves me a lot of time. Right-click gives me a list of commonly used programs to start. To answer your question, when I'm not using a window and want to get it out of the way, I shade it. It's a lot easier to find it again since it hasn't changed position.
Trust me, after getting used to that, it's a pain to work in Windows because it just takes so long to get anything done.
One feature I absolutely love about sawfish that Windows doesn't have anything close to is the customizible bindings to do almost anything you want. On an MS box, if the title bar of a window is obscured, there is no way to move it without either moving something else first, or using the task bar to raise the window (disrupting your Z order). In sawfish, I just hold down the windows key, grab the window anywhere, and drag it where I want it (without changing the Z order). Incredibly convenient. And Windows+X for an xterm? ;)
And don't even get me started on focus-follows-mouse. Just imagine having a bunch terminals or whatever, simply pointing at the corner of xmms with the mouse, pressing 'B' for next track, then going back to what you were doing. Windows has a hack with tweak UI that tries to do this, but some apps (*ahem*, MS OFFICE *ahem*) insist on raising themselves to the top whenever they get focus, which is incredibly annoying...
Enlightenment was briefly part of gnome, but the dependencies and politics killed that. At that point E ran on a variety of platforms, and the gnome people of the time didn't have any short term plans to move off x86 hardware and linux. Raster et al more or less had a choice between personally porting the rapidly moving target of the gimp tool kit (gtk) to Solaris etc, or just keeping the window manager seperate. Gnome at the time was sadly dominated by politics over functionality, but thankfully moved on to where it is now. There were actually arguments at the time over whether it should ever be ported to any kind of commercial OS for idealogical reasons. In hindsight, the Enlightenment project was better off without that, and other themed window managers were developed to work with gnome and kde. E v0.16 of course works with both.
E was always about "kewl fx" as well as funtionality anyway - the alternatives were fvwm (not fvwm2) which looked pretty horrible and was time consuming to configure, and windowmaker, which had a few cool features like the dock.
That, I believe, is the long range plan. E at the time was simply a window manager with icons, menus, and a pager. The filemanager etc comes seperately, as whatever one you pick from kde, gnome or myriads of unconnected projects.