What Happened to 5dwm?

CoolVibe asks: "Remember that project called 5dwm? It was supposed to give us free Unix users a Magic Desktop clone. The project seems to have died. What happened to it? Are there any mirrors? As far as I can remember, this project wasn't open source. Too bad, because if it was, we would have a MD clone. Anyone who remembers working on a SGI machine (I used to use an O2) probably has fond memories of the Magic Desktop for IRIX. If anyone from SGI is listening, how about porting that fantastic piece of work to Linux and the *BSD's?"

Comments

"Indigo Magic" or "IRIS Interactive Desktop"

[Twirlip of the Mists]

I don't mean to nitpick, but the correct names for the SGI desktop environment were either "Indigo Magic" (the older name) or "IRIS Interactive Desktop" (the circa-IRIX 6.5 name). Calling it "Magic Desktop" isn't technically right.

Just dotting the i's and crossing the t's.

well, for one thing it kinda sucked

[quinto2000]

I've used it on an Indy machine (IRIX 6.5 or so) and while it's not terrible, it's also not terribly functional for today's desktop user. While it had some good ideas, they've all been expanded upon and are exhibited much better in most modern desktops. I'd use it over Windows 3.1, but not much else. On the Irix box, my desktop consists of a number of xterms and Window Maker :)

Re:well, for one thing it kinda sucked

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Indigo Magic had one thing that no other UNIX desktop that I've seen was ever able to provide: ubiquitous drag-and-drop on a level rivaling what you get with a Mac. If you had two programs that were written with Indigo Magic desktop integration code in them-- admittedly, these were few and far between-- you could drag something (say, a picture) out of one app to the desktop, then drag the icon from the desktop to a folder, then from the folder to the other app. It worked really well. Indigo Magic was (is, I suppose) really light on the eye candy but seriously strong on application integration.

Re:well, for one thing it kinda sucked

[Neillparatzo]

Vector-based icons were cool. And the little wheel that you could drag up and down to make them bigger... and smaller... and bigger... and smaller... and bigger... and smaller... and bigger... and smaller...

Second thought, I lost so much productivity to IRIX. Good riddance.

Re:well, for one thing it kinda sucked

[spitzak]

You were correct, up to a point.

Both KDE and Gnome use XDND and you can drag & drop. (Gnome also supports some older protocols but I believe it uses XDND even when you go between two Gnome programs).

The problem is not the protocol, but the data being dragged. About the only things you can drag are text (and recently some url's). But in fact XDND has a type identifier very much like Windows for the type of data. In theory the ability to drag different types of data is identical in both systems. However I can list a few advantages Windows has:

First and foremost is that they list in their header file a simple enumeration of types of data. Yes in many ways the set is stupid and based on 1985 technology (for instance URLs are not specified), but at least the list is there and easy to find. The Linux design suffers greately because the people writing XDND try to be correct and admit that somebody else probably knows how to select the data types better than they do. Unfortunately what happens is nobody does.

Second, for some data types (particularily Bitmap) Windows has a simple method to get it on the screen. So an app that just wants to draw what was dropped on it and not think about it much, it is pretty easy. Compare this to X where it is a total nightmare to draw an image (again caused by engineers who don't want to risk doing it wrong and so only provide low level stuff that describes how the screen works). I would think if you had to do a different call for each letter to draw it you would not drag & drop text either.

I am not sure what the problem is with the Xlib designers. I think a lot of it is paranoia about back compatability, and a lot of it is the inability to see that their interface is not understandable, and that an understandable and simple interface is much more important that the maximum-speed interface.

Do we need yet another window manager (YAWM)?

[Bob Bitchen]

I have fond memories of the Irix desktop but it wasn't so good that we need YAWM. There are enough to choose from now. Nostalgia isn't the right reason to choose a window manager IMO. The Open source community really needs to focus on fewer projects and make those projects that are popular robust, make them out-perform the alternatives and give them the features that are taken for granted in the mainstream OSs like MacOS X and Windows. Have a look at sourceforge sometime and you'll agree that things are spread too thin. Lots of projects that have never even released any files. Focus on making what's working now better instead of coming up with another new project will help us all.

Re:Do we need yet another window manager (YAWM)?

[Permission Denied]

OSS does not need managers.

I wrote a window manager because that's what I wanted to do and I was able to do it better than anyone else that's ever written a window manager (because I know what I want in a window manager and everyone else got it wrong when they tried). I don't care if you, or anyone, else finds my work useful - I posted the code because it doesn't cost me anything not to do so. This is my spare time and I'll spend it as I see fit.

If you want me to write whatever god-awful financial database application you may consider useful for your business, you'll have to pay me because that's not fun. That's what I do at work - I write window managers and kernels at home because that's fun, and it's not as much fun dealing with the politics on other window manager projects.

Whoever said that we need some ridiculous system to pander to newbies like OS X or Windows? FreeBSD does everything I want it to do and if there's a problem that bugs me, I'll write a patch. I don't give a damn about its commercial success because I'm not getting a cut. As long as it's still alive with people like me and I can still use it, I'm happy.

If you're really worried about these issues, shut the hell up and write code. Don't come in to some project expecting to manage and direct it, because I don't take kindly to armchair managers.

some may need them , let them do it

[photon_chac]

Well, this project ( developing another WM ) might contribute little to OSS community but , it could bring back a lot of joyful memories to those who had been lived with it. So , IMHO , if there are people willing to spend some time on bringing it to Linux or *BSDs , let them do it and we're glad that they do so , and that's what the author's calling for.

Some comments

[CoolVibe]

yes, I'm the one that submitted this story. Here are some other things I found out:

I also posted an article about this on Advogato here. I got some replies on that, and one person attended me to here where you can find a copy of the 5dwm stuff.

About the functionality of this thing, it's not just a WM. It's a desktop environment. If you ever worked on a SGI machine, you'd agree it was (well, arguably) the best damn internet workstation out there. Sure, KDE and Gnome fill in a huge gap here, but there is much to be learned from how the IMD is put together.

I hope the people at SGI see this and decide to either opensource this thing, or to provide linux binaries. I know, it's idle hope, but a man can dream, can't he? I'd love to see this on my desktop at home.

Should copy the good stuff from 4DWM

[spitzak]

I don't think we need another window manager, but having used Irix for many years, and then switched to Linux, there are a few things that it did that I really miss, and I seriously think they should be put into modern Linux window managers:

One is MWM style raise/drag behavior. Even though I thought it was strange when I first encountered it, I quickly learned to use it, and it is obvious from trying to use modern systems how much superior it was. The rules were simple: the only thing that raised a window was a quick click in the window border. If you dragged or resized the window, it did not raise! Also (vitally important) if you clicked inside the window it did not raise.

Basically if windows raise on clicks it makes it impossible to use overlapping windows. The real horror of today's designs is that nobody seems to realize this, and think all kinds of actually retro ideas ("tiled" windows, "dockable" windows, and "MDI") are "innovations" and not just work-arounds for this bug. If tiled windows were so great they would have been adopted from the Andrew system (or the first Windows systems) for the entire screen. The truth is that the human mind is not set up to deal with objects that change size based on stuff other than the contents of the objects, and this is very unfriendly and makes it hard to spacially locate things. The other scary thing is that every time this is proposed somebody says "but that will be user-unfriendly because it is not EXACTLY like Windows!!!". I believe these are the same Whiners who keep saying "Linux does not innovate".

Another thing is to stop locking "parent" and "child" windows together. This is really the same complaint, but there are NO modern window managers that don't have this bug. What happens is that if you raise a child window, they raise the parent as well, rather than leaving the parent where it was. The parent/child relationship should specify an order but does not mean they have to be next to each other. Again this bug prevents overlapping windows, unless you make all of the windows children of some large and useless parent window.

Also Irix's terminal emulator was a lot better. Especially the methods use to select text and end-of-line. On xterm, kterm, and gterm and the OS/X Terminal app I have to be really careful when trying to select text, and I almost always get it one character off on the end. For some reason the algorithim used by Irix worked perfectly.