Before I begin, let me note that my knowledge of WindowMaker and
Enlightenment is _solely_ from screenshots on the Web pages you pointed
me to.
On 4 Jul, Stig wrote:
> 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.
You might want to take into account the fact that some of us don't have
the resources to continually upgrade hardware. I'm running a Pentium
120 with 64 MB of RAM and 2 MB VRAM, which ain't bad (I wouldn't
consider it "retrocomputing"), but is already about a year obsolete.
When I'm running Netscape, a few Tcl/Tk apps, a few Emacses, a lot of
Xterms, and the Gimp or POV-Ray (a situation that happens not
infrequently), I go heavily into swap space and my CPU load is
sometimes high. In these situations (as I have while I'm writing this
letter), I very much like to have a simple and efficient window look.
> It's basically junk.
I think what you mean is that it LOOKS like junk; for the most part, I
agree, since the default system is not flashy. However, fvwm's pixmap
capabilities, while certainly not as extensive as Enlightenment's, can
make a very nice-looking desktop if you're into that kind of thing (I'm
not).
What X and FVWM, and, indeed, most Unix apps are, is _functional_.
Unix programmers optimize for functionality and speed, but usually not
good looks. (The Gimp is the exception, though it loses in speed and
bloat, IMHO.) From what I saw of Enlightenment's desktops, it is
indeed stunningly beautiful, but I can't really imagine getting any
serious work done with all that visual noise. Also, with such a
complete predominance of images over text, I would be very confused
trying to figure out, for example, Enlightenment's button bar.
In other words, Enlightenment might be great for graphics buffs
running i686/366's with 1 GB of RAM and 4 MB of VRAM, like you, but for
the rest of us who just want to USE their wm's, as opposed to admiring
them, FVWM is great.
> 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.
As I said, my computer is pretty good, but I still like FVWM's
efficiency.
> Hmmmmmm, maybe I should just scan the case and use it as a screen background!
> Want another computer? ;-)
Good idea! I'd love a laptop, of any speed!
> 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...
Better yet, why not just use FVWM itself?
> 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...
One of the nice things about Unix is that you have many choices. I
definitely wouldn't like it if all the wm's were combined into one as
inefficient as Enlightenment must be. (Remember, I've only seen the
screenshots, but I surmise that it uses the hellishly slow X11 SHAPE
extensions, no?)
BTW, it might be nice to add Shaped decoration support to FVWM... I'll
look into it, though, I agree, fvwm's code is extremely messy.
>> 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.
Maybe it just takes an evil spy like you to give us a kick in the seat
of the pants :)
> AfterStep is probably the most mature.
I don't know much about it, so I can't comment; however, if I remember
correctly, AfterStep is based on FVWM2.
> WindowMaker will leave AfterStep behind soon (if it hasn't already)
WindowMaker appears to be in the early beta stages now, and I frankly
can't see what it has that any other wm doesn't...
> Enlightenment is probably the most promising because it's really NEW.
Enlightenment may well be the wm of the future, and is definitely worth
looking into. OTOH, it doesn't appear to have any new features other
than the fancy wm decorations, which surely aren't the most important
feature of a wm.
> It is totally undocumented and spare but it's pretty readable...
Just wait a few years, until it's actually usable on normal
computers... By then, it'll probably be as munged up as fvwm's :)
> The theme interface is neat. It reads prepackaged tarballs so that
> sampling interfaces written by other people is pretty idiot-proof.
That's nice, but rather superficial, don't you think? Still, it might
be nice to make FVWM more modular in this respect.
> 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.
I disagree wholeheartedly. Modules are more efficient than scripting
languages, since they can be compiled, but are more versatile, since
many scripting languages can be hooked into the module language. I
think we now have tcl, perl, and python for FVWM, am I correct? I
suppose we could have a guile interpreter too, but who'd want to use a
LISP-derivate? Blech.
Okay, that's my $0.02 (maybe $0.03) in defense of FVWM. BTW, don't
think I'm against your criticism in this group -- it might just get
some of us off our asses. Probably the biggest impediment to the Great
Code Rewrite is lack of leadership (no offense, Chuck). Chuck's been
too busy to organize people, and I guess no one else really feels he
has the Chuck-given right to make massive changes to FVWM's codebase.
--Chris
--
WORDS IN THE HEART CAN NOT BE TAKEN.
-- Terry Pratchett, "Feet of Clay"
______________________________________________________________________
Chris Laas: out-of-work programmer / mailto:chrisl_at_cybercom.net
< Unix, C/C++, Java, Perl, Tcl/Tk > / http://www.cybercom.net/~chrisl/
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Received on Sat Jul 05 1997 - 16:44:06 BST