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

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

[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?

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

[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?