Window managers

Adam McDougall mcdouga9@egr.msu.edu
Tue, 10 Apr 2001 18:00:00 -0400 (EDT)


eye lubb icewm.  Have ever since sometime in fall97/spring 98, I thought
it was clean and fast and pretty simple and I loved the granularity with
which I could control window behavior.  One of my pet peeves is things
!@#$!$ing changing focus and placement on their own, the last thing I want
is to be typing away in one window and have something pop up a window and
take my next keypress as an OK to format my hard drive or put my underwear
on ebay or who knows what because its gone before I could read it! *phew*.
Anyhow, I found icewm did a good job at helping me specify pretty exact
behavior for that kind of stuff which I really liked.  If some program
gets really out of hand I can have it even enforce focus to stay on the
window the mouse cursor is over.  It also compiled on solaris on the
engineering unix computers so I've been using that instead of CDE
especially since it starts up so much faster.   The one thing that bugs me
about icewm though is it seems like they release a new version the day
after whenever I install it on a new workstation install, garr!  Not a big
deal though because it doesn't depend on a bazillion other libraries that
also need recompiling, just basic X libraries and maybe xpm.

--------------------------------
Adam McDougall


On Tue, 10 Apr 2001, Edward Glowacki wrote:

> OK, I've temporarily solved the window manager problem... =)
>
> IceWM has its own task bar/pager with a clock, so I'm all set there.
> It also seems to be fairly configurable (which you can optionally
> do with a 3rd party utility called "icepref"), and supports themes
> (which is a "good thing" I think, since I didn't like the default
> window dressing...), and it supports virtual desktops.  It doesn't
> specifically support multiple displays, but I solved that by just
> spawning an extra one on :0.1 for the other screen.  So far so
> good... =)
>
> Sawfish is the other one I'm looking at.  I actually have it running
> on my second display instead of another copy of IceWM, so I can
> play around with 2 WM's at the same time! =)  Sawfish is configurable
> with LISP, which means it should be capable of just about anything,
> and it doesn't include any of the things a window manager shouldn't
> do (loading wallpaper, etc.).  The GNOME panel works with it, but
> not entirely perfect.
>
> I'm excited to see what Sawfish can become, but I'm not excited
> about learning LISP and spending huge amounts of time to do it, so
> I suspect Sawfish will take a back seat to IceWM for a while at
> least.
>
> Anyone else have any thoughts on these two?
>
> --
> Edward Glowacki			glowack2@msu.edu
> Michigan State University
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