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WindowMaker Development Resumes, Has First Release Since 2006
First time accepted submitter brad-x writes "A new team of developers has recently picked up development of WindowMaker, and they've added many new features, including improved support for the freedesktop standard menu layout and Mac OS X style application and window switching from the keyboard, culminating in a new release, 0.95.2. A basic changelog is available on the newly redesigned website."
I actually use WindowMaker on my personal dev-server-slash-tertiary-backup-desktop. It's an old piece of junk - Athlon 900 FTW! - but it still runs, and I don't have to worry about breaking anything important.
I've tried various window managers and desktop environments. KDE, even a 2.x release, is too slow. Same for GNOME. Most of the rest are too capability-light for me to seriously use. But WindowMaker hits the sweet spot of "runs fast on old crap" and "is actually usable".
This is the same machine I keep a copy of Firefox 2 on, since anything after that doesn't so much "run" as "walk".
Personally, I've used WindowMaker since the early '00s, and I'm still sticking to it. As a power user, I find its customization abilities extremely helpful. Also, I like that it's sticking to what it does best -- window management -- without eating up most of my CPU and GPU resources and bloating my memory. That's great news, keep up the good work!
I never "got" WindowMaker. I gather it was good back in the day, when docks were kind of a special feature. But these days even Fluxbox has support for dock apps. So why WindowMaker?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
So have I—only more seriously. I built a crude imitation of the NeXT UI for Windows in tribute four years ago and I can't live without it. Tiles for icons was a Good Idea.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
With a lot of people unhappy with the direction Gnome 3 and Unity are going. WindowMaker is a nice light window manager. It's what I use to use until active development stopped. I will look at it again for sure.
xcompmgr was always just the demo/reference compositor... IIRC it had (still has?) memory leaks... cairo-compmgr almost works but for whatever reasons goes out to lunch whenever changing display settings (I might have a laptop and external monitor so that makes it really, really unusable for me).
Unfortunately things like Expose can't be implemented in an external compositor now (at least not in a flashy or particularly usable way)-- there's no way for the window manager to say "hey can you do this fancy animation crap for me". AFAICT there is only a window property that communicates the translucency level of a window available. The same goes for fancy iconization effects, graying out unfocused windows, wobbly dragging, etc.
And so every window manager ends up having to implement its own effects using its own internal protocol... it's a hard problem figuring out the needed common ground (especially when GNOME and KWin both appear to be actively divorcing themselves from X11). I've always wondered how hard it would be to at least make Compiz a library that other window managers could integrate (some construction needed) to gain compositing and effects... but I'd rather whine about how CLIM had a transformation and frame management protocol in 1995 that could do all of this without radical replumbing like X11 does ;)
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
Since Window Maker has had pretty bad multi-display support, when I got a new laptop a summer or two ago I looked for replacements and discovered ... Sawfish is alive too. I'm using it now with xfce-panel and gnome-session (2.x since 3.x hates me) and it's pretty tolerable (supports all of the new window hints and session management stuff ... giving me something that's almost as reliable as what I had with Window Maker a decade ago). I really, really miss the dockapps though... the network and cpu monitors available nowadays blow and I've never really gotten over now having a dock app to control my music player ("media keys" get the job done but you get used to doing things a certain way when you've done them that way for a decade and all).
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
The first suggestion was to use existing CLI utils, augmented with new CLI utils. (In fairness, there were some other ideas that did make it in and script-fu is similar in spirit to cli apps)
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Terminal *windows*? I switched to yakuake long ago and using a terminal *window* feels so awkward now.
I even find myself repeateadly pressing F12 and wondering why nothing pops out when occasionaly using Windows.