Alexis Rosoff wrote:
>
> Alexis -- who just saw how many times she used the word `nice' in this
> e-mail; I think it's time for a thesaurus...
> --
> |\ _.,,---,._ `The main things which seem to me important
> /, `.-'`' -. ;-;;._ on their own account, and not merely as
> |,4- ) )-,_..;\ ( `'-' means to other things, are knowledge, art,
> '---''(_/--' `-'\_) instinctive happiness, and relations of
> Alexis Rosoff alexis_at_li.net friendship or affection.' --Bertrand Russell
^ nice cat ^ nice quote
> On a fairly slow (486DX2/66) with only 8MB of RAM and 1MB of video RAM (I
> can run 16bpp, but it's slow, so I've usually only 256 colours) PC running
> Linux, fvwm is by far the speediest window manager and with proper care in
> icon selection, the one using the fewest colours for the nicest-looking
> result.
Yeah, but I'm not much into retrocomputing. I have a dx2/66 notebook with
three times the memory and I can't stand to use X with or without fvwm.
It's basically junk.
Programming for the computers of today and tomorrow is more interesting and
more rewarding than programming for the computers that you only keep around
because you're sentimentally attached to the stickers that you can't peel
off their cases.
Hmmmmmm, maybe I should just scan the case and use it as a screen background!
Want another computer? ;-)
> Afterstep has some nice features; from what I've seen, enlightenment looks
> nice too. But they're far too slow for me.
Enlightenment is slow because it uses ImageMagick to do weird things to the
window decorations. I'll bet that it'd be relatively easy to add boring but
efficient window decorations to get back vanilla fvwm2/win95 decors for
retrocomputing buffs...
There's a lot of effort going in parallel directions on the window manager
front. Granted that almost zero effort is going into fvwm2, but it would be
a really good thing to unsplinter the various window manager factions out
there and, uh...take over the world? no that's not it!...uh, look forwards
instead of backwards...
> Perhaps fvwm's code isn't the most elegant, but officially it's still
> beta, and perhaps a code cleanup will take place either before the
> official 2.1 release, or during the next development cycle.
I don't see anyone doing the work and it strikes me as easier to start from
a different codebase.
Laziness is Enlightenment, WindowMaker, or AfterStep...
AfterStep is probably the most mature.
WindowMaker will leave AfterStep behind soon (if it hasn't already)
Enlightenment is probably the most promising because it's really NEW.
So, I've taken a look at the code for Enlightenment.
It is totally undocumented and spare but it's pretty readable...
There's a third-party project afoot to add documentation.
The theme interface is neat. It reads prepackaged tarballs so that
sampling interfaces written by other people is pretty idiot-proof.
There is no "modules" interface.
The lack of a modules interface is good because I think that modules in
their current incarnation are a pain.
A threadable scripting language makes a lot more sense. Guile, python and
perl are almost there (patches are available but the standard releases don't
thread yet). Because Enlightenment lacks a lot of baggage, it's a very good
candidate for being SWIG-ified... SWIG generates scripting language glue
for all the popular scripting languages: perl, tcl, guile, & python. And
interestingly enough, it seems that python 1.5 will become a guile
"personality."
Stig
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Received on Sat Jul 05 1997 - 00:48:38 BST