[HN Gopher] Window Maker: X11 window manager with the look and f...
___________________________________________________________________
Window Maker: X11 window manager with the look and feel of the
NeXTSTEP UI
Author : lnyan
Score : 121 points
Date : 2024-08-28 18:05 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.windowmaker.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.windowmaker.org)
| JNRowe wrote:
| Related: There is an in-development Wayland compositor for the
| Window Maker look and feel called wlmaker1. It is already quite
| usable, but is _very_ barebones right now.
|
| 1 https://github.com/phkaeser/wlmaker
| lagniappe wrote:
| X11 did nothing wrong. You hear me? Nothing.
| speed_spread wrote:
| It's true except no one wants to maintain it anymore because
| the code is a mess. This is how software dies.
| talldayo wrote:
| x11 doesn't do much of anything to begin with, these days. It
| will still exist for the people that want to use it, but
| distros are right to not default to it anymore.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Did they ever fix the accessibility situation on Wayland?
| Non-accessible defaults are not great IMO.
| spookie wrote:
| The issue is still open for GNOME, so I would assume it
| still is very much a problem:
| https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/9
| johnny22 wrote:
| gnome and cosmic are both using accesskit for some of the
| parts that aren't completed yet.
| indrora wrote:
| X11 did a lot of things. None of them "wrong", just "badly
| conjoined at the spinal cord".
|
| An X server is a fantastic example of how building drivers
| for deep hardware components should never have been written
| in userspace.
|
| (If anyone wants: There's a fantastic talk at LCA a few years
| ago from Keith Packard about X's history:
| https://youtu.be/cj02_UeUnGQ )
| immibis wrote:
| X11's architecture, on the other hand, is arguably better
| than Wayland's. Server-side rendering is a great way to
|
| It also has lots of flaws. "Mechanism, not policy" has to
| go, because you are trying to make a desktop environment,
| not draw arbitrary rectangles to the screen. It is already
| a given that there is one special client called the window
| manager; it would serve the architecture well to _know_
| that 's _the_ window manager instead of treating every
| client as if it could potentially be a window manager. But
| Wayland goes even further in this direction, eschewing
| things like icons, title bars and resize borders, which are
| basic expectations of a desktop environment. While X11 's
| way of doing these things is esoteric, at least it has one.
| (If it were up to me, standardized window properties would
| be promoted to requests, so you'd just call
| xcb_set_window_title instead of fussing with atoms and
| window properties).
|
| Another anecdote is HDR: Wayland seems to still have not
| standardized how it should work; meanwhile on X11, there is
| already protocol support for multiple pixel formats (1-bit,
| 4-bit, 8-bit, 16-bit, 24-bit displays) and you could just
| add 48-bit color to that list. That would be one of the
| things Wayland stripped out while striving for simplicity
| (since everyone had 24-bit colour at the time) that turned
| out to actually be important.
|
| ---
|
| At some time before the heat death of the universe, I will
| get around to trying to fork Xorg and remove all the cruft
| and see where that goes. (Server-side rendering is _not_
| cruft. User-mode SVGA drivers are.)
|
| I did minimal work on this already - as in, I downloaded
| Xorg's source code and had a look through. The whole
| configuration system has to go. The XFree86 driver code and
| driver abstraction has to go, and the DRM driver hard-wired
| in place. Using dlsym to locate compiled-in modules makes
| tracking dependencies impossible.
|
| I suspect this has something to do with the state of Xorg:
| Nobody knows what it should and shouldn't do, and the
| module API for Xorg is the entirety of Xorg, so changing
| anything is liable to break someone's external module that
| wasn't on the "it should do this" list.
|
| It wouldn't be the first time the X server was forked with
| the intention of cleaning it up: Xorg is a fork of XFree86,
| which was a fork of X386, which was based on something I
| don't remember.
| barryrandall wrote:
| The problem is what X11 didn't do: attract and retain
| maintainers.
| l72 wrote:
| Why can't we have a wayland server that can run different
| window managers like X did? That way, we only need one wayland
| compositor, and everyone can just write their own window
| managers.
| nine_k wrote:
| This looks doable. Create a Wayland compositor that does not
| do visible window management itself, but exposes an API to
| help relatively easily port and run an ICCCM-compliant WM.
|
| This looks so obvious that it _ought_ to have been tried.
| johnny22 wrote:
| Mir is perhaps the closest thing to that ideal that I'm aware
| of. Maybe arcan, but I don't know anything about the
| architecture
| aidenn0 wrote:
| TIL that Mir is not dead, but pivoted to be built on top of
| Wayland.
| wongogue wrote:
| That's what wlroots is (almost). Many wayland window managers
| use that to offload wayland stuff.
| jmclnx wrote:
| A big thanks to phkaeser for this work.
|
| If I am ever forced to use Wayland (yes forced), I could very
| well seem my self using Compositor.
|
| Great work!
| itomato wrote:
| I just skimmed but it looks like it's missing something like
| WiNGs
| neilv wrote:
| Nice to see they're still doing updates to WindowMaker
| ("https://www.windowmaker.org/news/"). I last used it 25 years
| ago, but always liked it, and wouldn't have minded having an
| entire desktop that started with NextStep design.
|
| (Lately, I use XMonad or i3wm on workstations that I use heavily.
| On systems that I use only rarely, I use the default Debian
| desktop, which currently is more Gnome-opinionated than I think
| is ideal for new user ramp-up, but it's stock.)
| v1ne wrote:
| What a blast from the past. WindowMaker served me well for many
| years, mainly on small screens. But once I started using multi-
| monitor setups, I switched to i3.
|
| One thing: WindowMaker is easy to use yet full of options to
| customize the appearance and behaviour of windows, per-
| application and per-window.
|
| Yet I think its killer feature for many years was the huge (64x64
| pixel) "dock apps". There, you could put widgets with a ton of
| nice functionality, such as WiFi status, mailbox, disk monitoring
| -- or just a clock. I don't remember if NeXTStep/WM were the
| first to offer those widgets, but I remember being a fond user of
| them.
| bestham wrote:
| The wharf? Suddenly that name made sense when linking about the
| heritage and the dock. TIL I guess.
| Agingcoder wrote:
| Yep. I used windowmaker then enlightenment ( I fell prey to
| shiny baubles ) then kde3 ( yes, in my mind still the single
| best desktop environment I've ever used ), and now i3. I love
| i3.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| I might be wrong, but i do not think NeXTStep had dockapps, i
| think the idea comes from older WMs which allowed X11 windows
| to be "swallowed" inside panels and Window Maker provided the
| same functionality in a NeXTStep-ish way (dockapps are just
| small windows nested inside a frame box around them).
|
| Actually at some point in recent years i used NeXTStep and
| having being using Window Maker for many years by that point, i
| felt a bit of an uncanny valley effect: what i was looking at
| the screen felt very familiar but still somewhat "wrong" and a
| ton of what i was used to didn't work (or worked in a different
| way) :-P. It made me realize what the people around the
| mid-2000s who tried various Aqua-like themes on GNOME 2, etc
| and said that it looks off/wrong were feeling like :-P.
|
| EDIT: also i think Window Maker is not the only window manager
| that supports/uses dockapps. I think FVWM and Afterstep can
| also use the same dockapps.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| Fluxbox also has first class support for Dockapps. They're a
| great pairing.
|
| An old screengrab to prove my point:
| https://www.thran.uk/img/desktop-aug-21.jpg. I'm especially
| fond of the VU-meter style ethernet traffic monitor, 'wmnd'.
|
| Find dockapps here: https://www.dockapps.net/
| bloopernova wrote:
| That screenshot makes me want to use Fluxbox, it looks
| great!
| Lammy wrote:
| Fun fact: though years after WMaker/AfterStep were already a
| thing, the Mac OS X Developer Previews, Public Beta, and 10.0
| had "Docklets" that worked somewhat similarly. The default
| Dock for a new user contained one for adjusting Monitor
| resolution and color depth. They were deprecated almost
| immediately when the MenuItem API was added to Mac OS X 10.1
| Reason077 wrote:
| Fascinating to see WindowMaker still going strong. I was a keen
| fan back in the day (late 90s/early 2000s?). It had a nice feel
| to it and made my Linux desktop look cooler than the other
| Linux desktops in our open plan office on a university campus!
| whalesalad wrote:
| Taking me back to when I first installed Linux back in 2001.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Still one of my faves, only edged out by tweaking XFCE to look
| like Mac OS Platinum:
| https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/04/12/2330 (I love
| collapsing windows for some reason).
| toddmorey wrote:
| Window shade was a brilliant feature!
| guerrilla wrote:
| I wish somone could do this with contenporary GNOME. It's a be
| a good fit.
| rcarmo wrote:
| There was an extension for that someplace, but I forget
| where.
| meepmorp wrote:
| I miss dock apps.
| setopt wrote:
| Aren't the panel widgets in e.g. KDE the same concept?
| fullstop wrote:
| Sort of, but dock apps all had to fit within a 64x64 pixel
| square. There was something nice about the constraint and how
| clever people were about fitting information within that
| square.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| Note that while 64x64 is the default, it is not the only
| size - you can configure the dock to use "icons"
| (dock/window/etc blocks) of sizes from 24x24 up to 240x240.
| Though in practice most dockapps are limited at 64x64
| (there have been some in recent years updated to allow
| other sizes from people who want to use Window Maker in
| HiDPI monitors) and using a different size has them
| centered (it might be possible to use the X11 composition
| extension to scale them in the future though, Window Maker
| already uses it to make previews for "miniaturized" -aka
| minimized- windows).
| abbbi wrote:
| used it for years, .. then switched to i3. Never looked back :)
| cmgbhm wrote:
| Ha! Long time since I've seen that. That was the first open
| source project I got involved in and wrote the FAQ off irc and
| mailing list questions.
| lucasoshiro wrote:
| I remember that years go (probably 2014) I was in one of the
| biggest retail stores in Brazil and I saw a different looking
| operating system in the salesmen computers.
|
| Years later I found that it was probably a Linux running Window
| Maker. It was surprising to see such a niche desktop environment
| being largely used by non-technical users
| toddmorey wrote:
| If I remember right, Best Buy used to run NextStep
| marcodiego wrote:
| Casas Bahia. I think they still use it to this day. Their IT
| must be made of heros.
| pndy wrote:
| That brings me Etoile from memory: http://etoileos.com/etoile/ -
| it's like a mix of NeXTSTEP/GNUstep with Apple's Aqua. Sadly the
| project is pretty much dead - github shows last changes done 8,
| 10 and 11 years ago.
| mulderc wrote:
| I was very interested in seeing where Etoile might go as it
| looked fantastic to me. Right now the most interesting thing I
| have seen in this space is helloSystem.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| I feel like the premise of helloSystem is the simple fact
| that macOS uses parts on FreeBSD therefore they decided to
| dress up FreeBSD to look more like macOS lol.
|
| To me that's not some meaningful that solves a fundamental
| problem. GNUSTEP is meaningful because it actually attempts
| to reimplement Cocoa.
|
| Because of that, I found Etoile more interesting than
| helloSystem because in turn it attempted to make GNUSTEP
| presentable to the non tech world in a way WindowMaker never
| will.
|
| I can understand helloSystem choice to ignore GNUSTEP given
| the GNUSTEP community is small and virtually inactive but
| again, it's just another ooh aah shiny project that won't get
| off the ground ever.
|
| If I were them I'd just port one of the many macOS looking
| desktop environments like whatever ElementsryOS or PopOS uses
| to FreeBSD and build from there. That's obviously more
| productive, but productivity can be boring because it's real
| and not a hobby project. :P
| jwells89 wrote:
| > If I were them I'd just port one of the many macOS
| looking desktop environments like whatever ElementsryOS or
| PopOS uses to FreeBSD and build from there. That's
| obviously more productive, but productivity can be boring
| because it's real and not a hobby project. :P
|
| I'm not sure how much productive it'd be in the long run,
| at least if faithfully replicating macOS is the goal. PopOS
| is bailing on GNOME (what it had been using) in favor of a
| bespoke DE because modifying GNOME had become too much of a
| pain, even for their relatively modest changes. Pantheon
| (elementary's DE) closely resembles GNOME for likely
| similar reasons.
|
| Not that any of the other DEs would serve as better bases,
| unfortunately. No matter what making a Mac-style DE is
| going to be a steep uphill climb.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| >No matter what making a Mac-style DE is going to be a
| steep uphill climb.
|
| I looked more into the project, his goal is actually to
| replicate the macOS from the 90s to early 2000s. I'm
| optimistic about a goal like that, but it's more about
| the QA that comes with these sorts of higher level
| projects. I don't think they have the resources to make
| something as out of the box as Ubuntu unless they use
| elementary or pop as their basis.
|
| That being said, why can't they just branch off into a DE
| with easy installation on BSD or any *nix loke XFCE or
| MATE? From what I've seen, they don't have a real reason
| to even use FreeBSD.
|
| This way they'd increase the likelihood of adoption but
| maybe at the trade off of supporting multiple platforms
| which I'd imagine can be a pain.
| jwells89 wrote:
| I agree that using FreeBSD as the base OS probably isn't
| necessary, but it does make sense if they're trying to
| provide an alternative to macOS, with the macOS userland
| much more closely resembling FreeBSD's than GNU's. There
| are BSD-styled Linux distros that could serve this
| purpose too, though.
|
| The problem with using almost any existing DE as a base
| is that Linux DEs are all inclined toward non-mac UI
| paradigms (most being Windows-like and a couple iPad-
| like), which means required changes will be numerous and
| deep. So much so that the benefit of not starting from
| scratch is dubious.
| cxr wrote:
| > Not that any of the other DEs would serve as better
| bases, unfortunately. No matter what making a Mac-style
| DE is going to be a steep uphill climb.
|
| No idea what the Elementary, helloSystem, Etoile, etc.
| folks are messing around about. The Cappuccino Project's
| Aristo is the best base to start with, and arguably looks
| better than Aqua. (I was never a fan of Aqua's overshined
| blue dialog buttons and scrollbars.)
| Lammy wrote:
| Neat -- I like it
| https://www.cappuccino.dev/aristo/showcase/
| BoingBoomTschak wrote:
| Really has that retro-cool look down pat, a bit like CDE. My
| journey was Openbox -> i3 -> bspwm, but I always wanted to try it
| just for the aesthetics.
| Findecanor wrote:
| I've been using it since it came out. Before that, I used a
| NextStep theme for FVWM.
|
| I'm dependent on WindowShade and wouldn't want to use a window
| manager without it.
|
| I have the Window List menu pinned below the dock on the right
| side of the screen, from where it can pop out to full width if
| the mouse pointer touches the screen edge. I much prefer that
| over a "task bar" that doesn't show full titles but takes up a
| lot of space. (and no, I don't use other icons intended for the
| purpose)
|
| I used to have my own patch with a few graphical tweaks but
| stopped compiling from source a long time ago.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| Got any any screenshots? I'm having a hard time imagining
| this..
| tangus wrote:
| The WindowMaker screenshots page has one just like they
| described: http://www.windowmaker.org/screenshots/lumpi-
| wmaker.png
| BaculumMeumEst wrote:
| Dude I need this for MacOS 8. God I would pay so much money for a
| replica iMac with MacOS 8.
| vvendigo wrote:
| I am using it for twenty years now. With disabled dock it's a
| minimalism at its best. Looking at comments, I should give i3 a
| try.
| itomato wrote:
| I agree, especially with Maximus and other tweaks.
|
| I will take our weird defaultsdb implementation over some of
| the alternatives that get pitched. Scheme? No thanks..
| calmbonsai wrote:
| Happy memories! I switched to i3, but man...yeah those were the
| days. I even built my workstation at the time to mimic the black-
| cube look of a NeXTcube.
| api wrote:
| I ran this _way_ back in probably the late 1990s in my college
| dorm!
| fullstop wrote:
| Me too! Our small Linux group was split between Window Maker
| and AfterStep, and then the kid with the nice GPU was running
| Enlightenment. Good times.
| karmakaze wrote:
| I tried Window Maker because I liked the aesthetics of NeXTSTEP
| when I'd used it. On Linux though, I just couldn't get used to
| the left-side scrollbars. It was ok on NeXTSTEP because that's
| how that always was, but seeing my Linux like that was one STEP
| too far.
| jwr wrote:
| Used it for many years on various machines, good stuff!
| lholden wrote:
| I used this for a couple years many many years ago. I even made
| several dock widgets for it for various purposes. The source code
| for these widgets even helped me get my first programming job!
|
| Good memories!
| gnuvince wrote:
| Back in 1998-1999, I was interested in installing and using Linux
| in large part because I thought that the screenshots of Window
| Maker that I saw online were so damn pretty. When I finally got
| to use it, I liked how "solid" it felt; the menus were big and
| large, they stuck to the screen even if you moved your mouse off
| of them, etc. I don't use Window Maker anymore, but it'll forever
| hold a special place in my heart.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Why did you stop using it?
| chrsw wrote:
| Too bad GNUstep never got popular
| squarefoot wrote:
| I kept it for a few years as my favorite WM, paired with Rox
| Filer with its panel switched off, that is, exclusively as a
| (very fast) file manager. WMaker turned out really useful when
| over 20 years back I had to set up lots of PCs for remote points
| of sale operations. Users should be able to do nothing beyond the
| strict necessary: send-receive mail, go to company's site,
| schedule remote management, print receipts, etc. No games or
| other distractions, no downloads, no customizable menus etc.
| Certainly not rocket science, but users would have very little
| computer experience, certainly none with Linux, therefore
| arranging user-proof kiosk-like desktops became mandatory or we
| would have been overwhelmed by complaints. WMaker did its job
| brilliantly, I put icons on the dock for all basic operations
| plus some safeguards to avoid deleting them and opening dangerous
| menus, and for what I know it still worked great when I left the
| company one year later. Good memories.
| icedchai wrote:
| I ran this on my Sparc 10 for a few years (late 90's, early
| 2000's.)
| wmlive wrote:
| Personally, i'd wish Window Maker wouldn't fall for pointless
| feature creep (in-built screenshot feature!?) and would instead
| replace WINGs with the GNUstep framework.
|
| GNUstep has silently matured over the years but still lacks a
| real native window manager. Window Maker once aimed to be that
| but unfortunately didn't ever manage to fully integrate with
| GNUstep.
|
| Fully porting Window Maker to GNUstep would be a Win-Win
| situation for all involved parties: GNUstep already features
| Wayland support and also offers a theming capabality for which
| WINGs' hardcoded and thus unchangeable NeXTSTEP aestetics are no
| match. So replacing WINGs with the GNUstep framework would
| instantly provide Wayland and more advanced theming support, for
| free.
|
| People interested in an integrated Window Maker centric system
| based on Debian/Bookworm should have a look at
| https://wmlive.sourceforge.net and
| https://sourceforge.net/projects/wmlive/files/ for downloads.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-08-28 23:00 UTC)