Matchbox -- a Small Footprint Window Manager

An anonymous reader writes "In this technical article at LinuxDevices.com, Matchbox project leader Matthew Allum introduces his creation Matchbox: a small footprint window manager for PDAs and other resource-constrained embedded devices. Allum recalls why he decided to embark on the project, outlines its key objectives, describes its architecture and unique characteristics, and ponders its future. Cool piece of software; good read."

Comments

small and efficient

[Prizm]

After reading the article, it's apparent that this is very small and efficient code. Solid stuff! What I'm excited is, how long until somebody adapts it to linux for the desktop. A manager that rips through windowing operations - yum!

Of course, I might have to get used to only being able to move my mouse an inch in any direction. =/

Hm

[zapfie]

With the extremely limited real estate on small devices, why use standard window controls (title bar, close box, etc.) which take up space? I would think it would make more sense to have an application take up the whole screen, and provide some space-friendly way to switch between them.

Re:Hm

[MonMotha]

Actually, it looks quite a bit like WinCE or QTopia. The window control widgets are very small and unobtrusive. As another poster mentioned, they're also themeable should you not like the boring defaults.

Window control is a must in any multitasking OS. Even if the windows are modal, like they are in matchbox, you still have to have a way to close them and flip between them. The most efficient way I can think of to do this is a toolbar at the top. A hotkey would be another possibility, but there aren't very many buttons on the iPaq (though the Zaurus has a full keyboard).

--MonMotha

Re:Hm

[Pig Hogger]

With the extremely limited real estate on small devices, why use standard window controls (title bar, close box, etc.) which take up space? I would think it would make more sense to have an application take up the whole screen, and provide some space-friendly way to switch between them.

The Windoze disappearing taskbar is a good point to start; why not have the improductive window border with all the scroll bars, buttons and whatnot disappear beyond the screen edge, only to appear when the pointer hits the side?

Re:Hm

[clickety6]

As you typically don't have many applications open on a handheld, isn't there a way to use the scroll button in combination with otehr buttons to either a) scroll the window b) scroll through open applications or c) scroll through the list of availbale applications?

Matchbox, FVWM, and other WMs

[MonMotha]

I used to run FVWM on my iPaq, and blackbox on occasion. They work, but due to the limited screen realestate, and also the orientation (3:4 instead of 4:3 aspect ratio), they tend to not work as well as one would expect. Then I tried matchbox, and I must say, Mallum has done a really good job.

I won't bore you with the details on how it works, you can read that in the article, but the way he has everything set up works very nicely. Modal windows are definately the way to go on such a small screen. Matchbox does this while still handling dialogs effectively.

--MonMotha

Low footprint and X

[Lupulack]

Don't get me wrong , I'm all for X on a desktop. But where in these devices is there a need for remote displays ?

Sure you can argue that this feature would be ideal for low-resource machines , but that's just not how they're designed. Better to use a custom gui , even based on the framebuffer device ( if we're talking a linux device ).

And for very small screen devices ( palms , watches ) the idea of windows and window borders seem wasteful. You only have what , 320x200 pixels , don't waste 5 per edge on borders.

From the screenshots Matchbox doesn't appear to have these problems of wasting screen space ( I am not a User Interface designer ) , but still ... X ? On a PDA ? Or watch ?

Re:Low footprint and X

[MonMotha]

Part of the reason for running X on these things is the fact that there's a HUGE amount of software instantly available. Remember, matchbox has modal windows for things other than dockables and dialogs. This elminates the problems with borders. When I ran FVWM I also turned my border width down to 2px.

Also, there are people who don't run X on handheld devices. The Zaurus for example runs QTopia, which draws to the framebuffer. An opensource, binary compatible clone is available under the name OPIE at http://opie.handhelds.org. However, it's not much different than running something like matchbox on X. There's also GPE, which the article mentions.

--MonMotha

Re:Low footprint and X

[batkiwi]

There's no greater feeling than firing up an IPAQ running X, ssh'ing to my power-machine with x-tunneling set up, then loading up mozilla/codeguide/gimp/other resource intensive program, and having it respond like a dream.

I actually see a need for it MORE on a tiny device, especially with wireless network adapters for IPAQs.

Re:Low footprint and X

[urulokion]

This isn't your Grandfather's X Windows.

The Xserver running on the Xipaq is the Tiny-X server running on top of the Frame Buffer. It has the XRandR, Rendering and AA font support extensions.And not only that it supports the Voyager PCMCIA VGA Card. But even given all of this, the Server and support libraries don't eat a lot of memory or storage resources.

Jim Gettys and Keith Packard has done a fantastic job of cutting down resource used in the IPAQ's X environment. And they're not done yet. There are still more reductions that can be done.

And don't discount having the ability of using remote displays. It's very nice to be able to run my PIM applications remotely from my IPAQ on my desktop machine: 1280x1024 screen, full sized keyboard and mouse. Who needs to do Hot/Active Sync'ing?

Re:Low footprint and X

[jimfulton]

Remember that when X was first invented, your average Unix workstation was less powerful than today's PDAs (permanent storage and display size aside).

It was even somewhat before the wide-spread availability of UNIX workstations....

At MIT, within Project Athena and the Lab for Computer Science (remember, this was 1984, pre-X11 and pre-X Consortium days), the target platform was referred to as a "3M" machine:

• 1 megapixel display
• 1 MIPS processor
• 1 MB of memory

The original X server was written for the Digital VS100, an intelligent (for the time) graphics display. Believe it or not, a single VAX 11/750 had several VS100s connected via fiber-optic cables. Imagine time-sharing on your PDA. :)

Jim Fulton

If it's resource constrained, why run X?

[Rolo Tomasi]

X is a resource hog. There are more efficient ways to implement a GUI, like using the framebuffer device, or Qt/embedded. X has its advantages when used on networks, like the client/server model, but it's overkill for personal devices. You don't run Oracle on your handheld to store your phone numbers either. Or do you maybe want to connect an X Terminal to your PDA?

Wait, maybe that would be cool, hmmm, you could then use all your PDA apps on the big screen while you're at home.

*shrugs*

Re:No X for my pda

[Anonymous Coward]

The original Amiga, the 1000, even threw in true multitasking and multimedia in 1985 with the same specs. Of course, the Mac/PC crowd was into monochrome screens and bleeps back then, so the Amiga was considered a "toy".

Now the PC is 1000 times the toy an Amiga ever was.

Oh well.

Anyone tried it on a tablet PC?

[salimma]

I'm getting one of those ProGears that Mira2Go is fire-selling - Transmeta TM3200/400MHz, 10.4" TFT, portrait/landscape mode, Slackware 7-based OS.

Has anyone tried running Matchbox on such a device, or a smaller screen (Curious,

Michel

Remember what happened to IceWM?

[Antity]

IceWM, "The Cool Window Manager" :-) came out to be a small-footprint, functional X11 window manager. Which it was (I think it was about 1.2M or less of RAM when I had it running).

Now it got deeper theme support, KDE and GNOME hints, sound support...

I wished I could still run it in 1.2M. :-(

The problem is that you can't simply turn off most of the bloat, and just taking an older version of the code isn't an option, too, since it contained several bugs. Guess it: The bugs were fixed and bloat was added.

I really hope these guys aren't going to do the same mistake.