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Sawfish 1.9 RC1 Released
Last Thursday, the Sawfish window manager project announced the availability of 1.8.92. The release brings several new features. Highlights include: support for MATE and Razor-Qt (along with better GNOME and KDE support), better edge action support, and improvements to the theming system. A new OS X style single window mode has been added, along with a really interesting shade stack feature:
"Added shade-stack feature. It provides an alternative to iconify-window. Instead of iconifying a window or minizing it to a tray, the windows get shaded and sorted in a stack starting from the top-left corner (the number of columns can be changed). Combined with auto-unshade this offers — possibly — a better way of interacting with windows which aren't required at the moment. Original code by Luke Gorrie. [Christopher Bratusek]"
This is the first release candidate for the new stable 1.9 series.
Single window mode hasn't been a standard feature of OS X since the public beta in 2000. I thought at first that it was referring to fullscreen mode in Lion, but it appears to really be talking about the original single window mode, which had a purple button in the upper right corner of a window before the button was turned into a white pill and made into a toolbar toggle. IIRC, the feature is still there if via a hidden defaults key.
This has got to be a belated April Fools joke.
Slashdot, circa 2002!!!
Don't quote me on this.
Any language that has more parens than keywords is all right by my book!
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."
-H. L. Mencken
FTFS: window manager.
News for Nerds.
Don't be so lazy
Oh, and this is a news aggregator, not a news site, there are no journalists here.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Why we'd want sawfish is interesting. So its got a lispy config file. So does my "awesome window manager". Well awesome uses Lua which is vaguely distantly scheme inspired. Doesn't sound like much difference. So I'd want to use "awesome" because... or "sawfish" because...
The standard /. car analogy is this is like a new car model press release that primarily mentions our new car has four tires, in contrast to the toyota camry which has 4 wheels. Um, OK, thats really interesting.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
From the summary:
"the Sawfish window manager project announced...."
Its a Window Manager...says it right there. if you want, you can even look it up without going to the page the same way you can look up any term you don't understand: http://bit.ly/HFbsr9
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Added after I put the boot in. At least someone's paying fucking attention.
>How about mentioning what it is?
Summary states it is a Window Manager.
>Why we should be interested?
It states the new features.
Do you need to be completely educated on the topic or something?
Offtopic: Has anyone done a distro using Razor-qt yet? I'm going to be upgrading to a newer laptop in a couple months and I would like to give this a whirl.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
Not heard anything about Sawfish for years. I'd come to the conclusion it was more-or-less abandonware. Great to see it isn't. It's an exceptional WM
Saw(fish/mill) was my favourite window manager years ago and I was upset when GNOME replaced it's official status with Metacity. It was a sad day when Eazel went bankrupt and John Harper went to work for Apple. He eventually abandoned this great work but as a FOSS project, it never dies. It becomes a stepping stone for the next generation of developers. Software development might be slower in the beginning but after a few years, FOSS is standing on the shoulders of giants and that will be a force that no single entity will be able to match.
ayottesoftware.com
Not only does TFS say it's a window manager, everyone (except you, I guess) knows it's a window manager, formerly known as sawmill, before some trademark issue forced them to rename it. Used to be the GNOME default, back before Metacity, so it's not like it's some niche thing.
So, in short, quit being ignorant, and learn to read so you won't complain about the summary not saying things it in fact does say.
I'm late to the party here, but it sounds like we need version control with diff callouts for slashdot summaries.
Just a guess. ;)
Christ, Slashdot, could this post have been any lazier?
Yes.
How about mentioning what it is?
the summary uses the term 'window manager' and mentions both GNOME and KDE, implying that it is for Linux
Why we should be interested?
This is like those raspberry pi articles. If you know what it is, you want to know that something is happening. If you don't already know what it is, you probably won't care any more now than you did before reading the summary.
So its got a lispy config file.
And a fantastic "sawfish-config" program that gives you GUI access to just about every configurable option, from basic to really esoteric, including theme-specific options. That way, you don't have to know Lisp or Scheme(*) to configure it.
(*)Or rep, the Lisp implementation developed by John Harper for his Sawmill/Sawfish project. "rep" is an abbreviation for "read-evaluate-print", the loop that Lisp-ish languages use. The desire has been expressed on the Sawfish Wiki, and on the mailing list, to re-work Sawfish for a more standardized Lisp-ish language, probably Scheme.
In the related links I saw "Can Microsoft Afford To Lose With Windows 8?" so I presume this can replace the Metro UI, but the page linked from TFS isn't clear how to do that at all.
Do these things exist independently of the DE that uses/used them - in this case what - GNOME 1 or GNOME 2? Since people have moved from GNOME 2 to various options - LXDE/XFCE/Unity/GNOME3/KDE et al, how does this WM still remain relevant?
If you don't know what it is, you won't be interested. Sawfish was once the default window manager of Gnome, so some die hard Linux fans might be interested.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
But marking it as a whole one for taxes...and maybe karma.
One could point out the intention may lie in the semantics of standard vs default. I'm just throwing in a, "One could." I don't own up to nothin'. My computer came with an operating system as part of the standard package, but I didn't like the default one they offered and replaced it with three Debian variants and an experiment with Gentoo (second version of stage 3 live CD was actually very impressive compared to the Ubuntu live CD of the same year).
Now, quick, before the fifteenth, how much is a shit worth?
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
I still have big sentiment to my first contact with sawfish. It was year 2000, and I was playing with my freshly installed debian box. I got rid of windows about 2 years earlier, and I was experimenting with everything that linux could have bring to me. I tried red-hat for 6 months, slackware, etc. Then I settled on debian. Next I was trying all desktop environments & window managers that dselect was showing in package listing (there was no aptitude at that time).
And I installed one by one, and used it for few days, maybe a week. Some of them felt strange, some felt crippled. Others like enlightement were slick, but looked unfinished. Then I found sawfish. It was nothing - just an empty screen. I was already accustomed with weird window managers, so without fear I tried pressing all buttons. Soon to discover that middle button is everything that I will ever need. I found the sawfish configurator and looked at what stuff I can configure. I was like, "whaaaaaa?"
First of all, I was always annoyed that to move a window I need to grab the titlebar, which sometimes is crazy small. So clickety-click told sawfish that I want to move the window by clicking *anywhere* on the window. And it worked! I clicked on the configuration dialog box, and started to move it around with reverence, which occurs to you, only when your wildest dream comes true.
Then a quick realization come to me: I forgot to use any modifier key. Left clicking on window was *only* moving it. I couldn't even click inside the window to start typing in whatever textbox was there. That was utterly cool & awesome! And of course stupid on my side. I used Tab key, and keyboard navigation to fix this problem in the configuration. Now I could move window only with left-click when Alt was pressed. That was awesome experience.
Next I started trying various themes and window frames, soon to discover that I could use a different window frame for every window! I used Bat theme, and called everyone who was at home to see how ridiculous it is :)
After a day or two I moved to another window manager, and kept trying all WMs that were in debian repository at the time. They all were wrong. Just wrong. Nothing could beat that weird window manager that did allow me to break mouse configuration. But I could not remember its name!
One evening I sat down at my PC determined to find that WM even if I will have to try every WM and every desktop environment that was offered in debian. Took a while, because I needed to find configuration options for given WM and check if it was possible to move window just by left-click dragging without modifiers. It was a shock, because soon I discovered that it is impossible in any of window managers, until few hours late at night I encountered this magical window manager: sawfish. What a happy reunion it was!
I don't think that I ever left sawfish alone, after that time.
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#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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correction: of course it was sawmill at that time :)
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#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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