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Saxonia Issue 04 Part 023
X and windowmanagers
By Rumrunner/VOID
l
We all know and love the Workbench on our dear Amigas. The situation is
quite different in unix. It's all textmode, and even though single programs
can open their own graphicsscreen, almost none does. To get a graphical
gui, you need X. This is a set of routines that does almost everything,
except managing windows and giving you a blowjob.
So, in order to move windows, close them, and flipping through them, you
need to run a windowmanager on top of x. There are several to choose from.
One named twm comes with x. It mostly sucks. What you get is a frame
around your windows, and you can pop a window to front by clicking in it
or on it's titleline. You can press the left mousebutton to get a menu,
for instance for starting programs. That's about it, no icons, background-
pictures or the likes.
Next, there are windowmanagers like mwm and fvwm, which is basically much
of the same stuff. I have never liked any of them.
There's another windowmanager that goes by the name of Amiwm, which tries
to look like our Workbench. While it might do a decent job in some areas,
it's far from usable. You can iconify windows, and you have the topline
from Workbench, but you cannot get icons for starting programs from, or
entering directories, atleast not in any usable fashion. Also, it default
makes the active window the one under your mousepointer, which irritates
me. You have to write a file named .amiwmrc in your homedirectory and
put : 1
focus : clicktotype0
in it to get the default handling of Amiga's Workbench.
Kde, the K Desktop Environment is a windowmanager and much more. It can
do most everything, you have icons, backgroundpictures, and kdeprograms
speak to eachother in quite a decent fashion. However, this is all written
in c++, so it's dead slow. About the only times my computers use virtual
memory is when running kde (or ofcourse some javashite). You also cannot
install just parts of kde in a decent manner. Kde itself spreads the
code which you have to compile in several archives. Kdelibs gives you all
the libraries you need. Then, kdebase gives you all the necessary stuff,
like the windowmanager, a filemanager, kdm (a graphical loginmanager)
and lots of other stuff, among them some texteditors. If you need some
networking tools, you can install kdenetwork, and so on. It's been a long
time since I used kde as a windowmanager, and I doubt if I ever will do
so again, I have found better alternatives. However, I still have kde
installed because of some of the programs. The thing is that the
kde filerequester can open and save files on remote computers easily.
If you want to reach a computer by ftp, you can simply type 1
ftp://username@computer.com0 in the pathfield, and then select the file you
want to edit or whatever. You can also reach computers by scp, using
fish://username@computer.com. For instance when writing php or similar, this
can come in handy to quickly change code on a remote computer.
Gnome is in many areas similar to kde, but it's faster and you can choose
what you want to install in a much easier way. The gnomefolks themselves
separate gnomeplatform and gnomedesktop. Gnomeplatform is mostly libraries
and programs strongly associated with them. This is the stuff you need to
run most programs, since almost everything except the programs that comes
with kde uses gnomelibraries for filerequesters, pulldownmenus, buttons and
whatever. If you also want the windowmanager, you will find the stuff you
need in gnomedesktop. And like said, you can install the parts you
want/need for other programs.
Gnome also seems faster than kde, perhaps not so strange since it's not
c++, but rather pure c. Ofcourse it's not assemblerspeed, but faster is
better even though it's not vastly faster.
One thing that really pisses me off with gnome is it's filerequesters.
It only shows files with names where the letters are in utf8-format.
I never use utf8, and so, if I use æ, ø or å in the filenames, these
files doesn't show. It's possible to set an environmentvariable to force
the requesters to use other charactersets, but I don't like having to do
so. I could ofcourse use utf8 all the way around, but it would irritate
the shit out of me using two bytes to save letters in filenames which
could have been saved using one byte.
I have chosen to use the windowmanager named Enlightenment. This can do
most of what you want to. You can use theme to make it look the way you
want to, personally, I currently use Ebench, which gives me windowborders
and controlbuttons similar to Workbench, both in looks and placement (I
strongly hate having the closebutton on the right side of the window).
Other popular themes are macos themes, it seems there are alot of them out.
The only thing I don't like about Enlightenment is that you cannot chose
to select active window by clicking in it without it popping to front. If
you prefer to automatically activate the window your mouse is over, you
don't have to let it pop to front if you don't want it to.
There are sadly no icons in Enlightenment, but I solved that with a program
called idesk. You have to run it when you start your windowmanager, either
as part of your startupscript or by hand. You can use whatever pngimage
you want to as icon, and they don't have to be the same size, this is the
first time I have seen that possible on anything besides Workbench. The
icons are purely for starting programs, and you cannot use them to enter
a directory, atleast not without starting a filemanager for the selected
directory from it. Except from that, it's quite nice.
There are lots of other windowmanagers, like xfce, waimea, blackbox and
fluxbox, but none of them have impressed me much.
Oh, all the things we don't have to worry about on Amiga.
