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.

Comments

Standing on the shoulders of giants.

[Flammon]

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.

Re:Standing on the shoulders of giants.

[Janek Kozicki]

A bit more history:
- in 2000 John Harper created sawfish,
- in 2005 he abadoned it.
- In 2007 he gave me full access to repository. Then I was officially a new sawfish developer. I revived sawfish and made few releases, mainly I brought back previously removed features (such as viewports). Also I concentrated on creating a useful wiki, that would allow everyone to easily submit patches. This wiki worked beyond all my expectations. We had 1 nice patch/feature per week for several years. There was actually a reason to make new sawfish release every three or four months. This work attracted more and more people to the community.
- In year 2009 I passed lead to new developer Christopher Bratusek, who was one of the first to join after I got access permissions from John Harper
- Currently I am amazed to see that in 2012 Christopher Bratusek is still doing great job

Let me paste here my slashdot post about sawfish, which I wrote some time ago.
==
I am using sawfish and ROX for over 15 years. I wouldn't change it for anything else. Even though my wife & sister & friends went through various generations KDE, gnome, unity and I learned how to use them (just for the sake of helping them). Still sawfish is the MOST powerful & fastest wm ever. And rox the lightest fm (file manager), but of course I use mc a lot (where I had submitted some patches too, especially with tree view of directories in another panel).

Imagine, that in sawfish you can even UNDO window actions (movement, resize, anything else). Assign different window properties per window type (frame(less) type, coordinates, size, placement strategy). You cannot even imagine how configurable are the keyboard shortcuts. No really. You. Can't. Imagine. Do you want have a totally mouseless workflow in multitude of opened windows? no problem. Want tablet? No problem. Window tabbing & window tling are the BASICS. Not some advance features. I haven't seen tabbing in any of those popular wms, like kwin or metacity.

There is no way I would even seriously consider any other wm than sawfish.

why rox? There's nothing lighter that gives me icons, a desktop and panels. My 8 cores and 32 GB of ram are better spent elsewhere than on clumsy desktop environment. I am running dozen of simultaneous calculations almost all memory is used, and sawfish is still as responsive as if there was nothing clogging the cores. I never stop to be amazed at that. Especially when I look at other people's PCs when they open just a few apps, and their desktop becomes so unresponsive that I would get mad.

This comfort also made me a little lazy to "clean up" my desktops. I have 24 viewports, they are all full of windows - betweeen 100 and 200 windows open (I guess about 150 right now). And they get dusty. After few months I discover some forgotten window on some viewport and it brings nice memories about what I was doing back then.
== end paste

side note: Christopher thinks that my desktop is "old school" and outdated ;) Mainly because I use plain old simple ROX instead of bells & whistles that are available right now. That's so funny for both of us. And it demonstrates how flexible sawfish is.

to be honest, I did a little cheat there: I run sawfish at -20 nice priority. Because I am really clogging all 8 CPUs with tons of calculations and other stuff (sometimes even too big for 32 GB of RAM that I have). And I do not tolerate any lag on the desktop.
I made a special pager background for sawfish-pager so that all my 6*4=24 viewports are labelled, and it amazes my friends when they see how I switch between them :)
I have three LCD screens: 1600x1200,1920x1200,1600x1200, all wonderfully working with xinerama (nvidia) and tuxonice hibernation (in case if power runs out, and I can't afford terminating my calculations, so better to hibernate). Heh, I like to brag about this setup sometimes, because I'm proud of how great it works :) Also this big screen setup lead me to find several obscure bugs in sawfish, and to fixing them.

It's not a coincidence that for all this great setup sawfish is the most important ingredient. Without sawfish I would feel like with my hands crippled, almost like without CLI.