Without trying to sound like too much of an unduly judgemental grump...
This is a tale of
Dissatisfaction ...
Industry ...
Shock ...
Horror ...
Despair ...
Discovery ...
and HOPE.
A few nights ago, I started hacking on fvwm2 to fix a few, uh, misfeatures.
- unnecessary conflict between maximization and windowshading
- arbitrary differences in argument handling of similar otherwise
commands (iconify and windowshade)
- silly inability to maximize between different zoom factors without
returning to the original window size.
As I worked, I found myself cursing the, uh, "randomness," slipshod
non-design and layering of cargo-cult duct-taped additions... The
profusion of variables named 'val1' and 'val2'. The poor state of
documentation and commenting, etc...
Basically, I kept wanting to rewrite bigger and bigger chunks of code...
What started as two XEmacs buffers grew to six and then eight and then ten
and beyond.
Then it dawned upon me that this was probably a huge waste of time.
Especially considering that fvwm-2.0.45 was released months ago and the
patches on the mailing list aren't even being collected and rereleased.
Has anyone done a survey of the "cleanliness" of other fvwm-derived
windowmanagers? Enlightenment, WindowMaker, and AfterStep all have diverged
significantly from whatever fvwm roots they might once have had.
Enlightenment is STUNNINGLY BEAUTIFUL and many of the AfterStep Themes are
as well. X11 has traditionally been pretty artless and so I'm quite drawn
to the energy and "aliveness" of these other efforts.
These are the window managers of the GIMP generation...
Window Managers for X
http://www.plig.org/xwinman/
Enlightenment
http://www.cse.unsw.EDU.AU/~s2154962/enlightenment
WindowMaker
http://mushi.colo.neosoft.com/wmaker/
The Official AfterStep HomePage
http://afterstep.edoc.com/
Vote for your favourite Window Manager
http://www.plig.org/xwinman/vote.html
Tales of your experiences are appreciated...
Stig
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Received on Fri Jul 04 1997 - 18:34:23 BST