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:Low footprint and X

[lpontiac]

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 ?

Development work. With platforms like the Palm or Windows CE, you generally need to choose between working on an emulator (which is slower than the device) or the device (which gets irritating when you've been testing a UI for hours and would really, really like to be able to enter text quickly).

Being able to run the app on the handheld, but manipulate it on the desktop, would be very handy. I think recent Windows CE devices have this ability. (Most devices don't have enough bandwidth between the handheld and the desktop for it to be viable).

Remember that when X was first invented, your average Unix workstation was less powerful than today's PDAs (permanent storage and display size aside). I don't think it's too much overhead.

Mac OS X

[bdesham]

If anyone's interested, I just ported this to Mac OS X, so you can use this WM with XDarwin. You need Xfree86 installed (you can get it from Fink).

Untar and ungzip the package.
cd to the source directory.
With your favorite editor, edit utils/Makefile.am by deleting the reference to minivol on the bin_PROGRAMS line, and removing the minivol_SOURCES line.
Run automake, ./configure, make and make install.
Make the appropriate modifications to ~/.xinitrc.

Re:Low footprint and X

[g4dget]

X11 is low footprint. X11 is smaller, for example, than a comparable Qt/Embedded environment. X11 is also very efficient: as others have pointed out, too: it was designed for machines less powerful than your PDA. The X11 protocol was hand-designed, unlike the RPC and distributed object protocols in vogue now, which have better tool support but bigger overhead as well. And X11 has been widely used in embedded systems over the years.

I think the reason why people think that X11 is big and resource intensive is because it scales up: if you allow it to (and most desktop installations do), it will take advantage of lots of memory and have all sorts of optional packages installed. Most likely your desktop X11 server includes various compression, image, 3D, and video functionality.

And X11 brings a lot of really useful features to the table. The fact that both client and server are user processes and are separate means that X11-based systems are very robust. The fact that window management and input methods are separate means that developers can really explore different options and pick the best for their device. For example, ]any handwriting input method developed for one X11-based handheld will work on almost any other, even if the user interfaces and toolkits are otherwise completely different. X11 is well-modularized.

The remote display capabilities are enormously useful for debugging. For example, you can prototype and debug your application on your desktop and just display on the handheld, in order to see how the UI works on a small screen. Or, you can have applications and development tools on the handheld pop up windows on the desktop.