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Window managers for the RULE project

Window managers are probably second only to VI and Emacs as sources of religious wars. I have already received a lot of suggestions about them.

General criteria

For the kind of desktops we are targeting, icons, panels and multiple workspaces, while not bad in and by themselves, are not something to worry too much about. When you have small screens and 16 colours cards, thing may get ugly otherwise.

As far as panels are concerned, they have two main uses:

  1. line up icons to click when you want to start a program, or
  2. host some system monitoring mini-window, telling you if you have new mail, RAM consumption, etc...

    The first use can be substituted completely by root window menus, and the second one provided by gkrellm or any other specific application(s) made just for this purposes. People who need a panel may be helped with FS-Panel.

    In this way, everything is modular, and optimized for low resources, without giving up any real functionality.

    We also want something which:

    Classical example of use of such a feature is grabbing headlines online with some web client script, and dump their titles and URLS into a file. If that file is formatted properly, you open the sub-menu "news" in the main root menu, click on some interesting argument, and your browser is launched directly on the corresponding URL.

    Session control

    I personally don't use it, but there are lots of people that may find it useful. Of course, when it only means "always start with the same apps, in the same positions on the screen", .xinitrc is all we need, but it would be nice to have it for real.

    This is probably impossible in our environment, but I just wanted to mention it hoping that somebody can prove me wrong..

    WM choices

    For the purposes of the RULE project, we can divide window managers in two categories. Those who are REALLY, REALLY minimal, and those wich manage to put together a visually cool interface and a lot of real functionality, all without making your CPU scream.

    I have arbitrarily restricted the following list to two representatives of the first class, and one of the second.

    The exclusion of WindowMaker and XFCE will certainly raise eyebrows, and some war axe too. Some of my reasons for this (apart from the fact that in my personal experience Blackbox has proven as the fastest and lighter in its category, and that this seems to be a common opinion around) are listed here.

    XFCE is a desktop environment, and the "do one thing only, but better" philosophy is good by itself and, in our case, more flexible, I think.

    An interesting justification presented for WindowMaker or XFCE is that they would require less adjustments for a user switching from MS Windows. I don't think this matters in our case: the newbie to computing will take whatever we give him, and won't find any interface weirder than another. Ex MS windows users will very often have enough hardware and/or expectations to just ignore us and go KDE or Gnome anyway.

    Another thing that prompts me to keep blackbox as the first choice is the fact that, while having more features than the really tiny ones (twm, oroborus....) it doesn't need any icon, panel etc..: as already said, this might prove crucial. Or not?

    Nothing is carved in stone, but at least we have something to fight on... On to the list!

    IMPORTANT: I have not tried yet if the following applications do have all the features I listed above, but they looked quite promising. Please correct me if needed!

    (NEW) SWM

    Less RAM needs than rxvt

    OROBORUS

    40 Kbytes stripped....

    http://www.kensden.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Oroborus/about.htm

    BLACKBOX

    with bbtools, all preconfigured to be fully useable without the mouse. Keep in mind that shell scripts can be linked from the root menu, and that we can even add pop up windows to them with XAsk, so they can perfectly emulate much heavier tools.

    Blackbox configured properly can really give you all the possible functionality (even playing MP3s via a shell script from the root menu) and almost all the visual bells and whistles one could ask, including multiple workspaces

    I am not considering the blackbox spin offs for now (waimea and fluxbox) because they are newer projects, and I'm not sure yet if the extra things they have are useful to us. If one needs the "more terminals in one window" one could also go for powershell, even if that might be an heavier, less integrated solution.

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    Copyright 2000/2002 Marco Fioretti, linuxdesk at inwind dot it. All Rights Reserved. Copyright 2002 The RULE project. All Rights Reserved.
    Generated on 2002/06/10 5:22:6 UTC