Re: Beyond twm

[David Holland <dholland-tech%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 09:55:56PM -0900, Phillip Rulon wrote:
 > Well, since the idea was to replace a very dated setup with one that is
 > less dated, I assumed that a modest improvement would suffice.  I was
 > planning something fairly simple.  If it's going to be the default, I
 > suspect that it should be quite conservative.  I had planned to extricate
 > multiple desktops and Xinerama in the interest of simplicity.  I use Xrandr
 > to set up multiple monitors and haven't used multiple desktops for some
 > time.  <full disclosure>I use a heavily modified, personal version of twm
 > implementing a stack (ring really) of applications that I can run without
 > the mouse.</full disclosure>

...if you use twm it seems slightly odd to be specifically interested
in migrating away from twm.

 > Having said this, if a broadly featured desktop is what the project is
 > after, then that can also be explored.  The main thing is to make an
 > improvement to what is now the standard.

fluxbox and golem were floated as choices by looking through wm/ in
pkgsrc and picking BSD-licensed packages that depend only on things
found in base. Relaxing on license purity gives a couple other
choices, like fvwm.

The idea is not to ship "a broadly featured desktop", meaning GNOME;
that's a different, much larger project.

 > Golem is also rather dated by bleeding edge standards.  The configuration
 > setup is brittle.  It can be configured by a diligent hacker but it's less
 > easy than other window managers.  The principal advantage seems to be that
 > it's BSD code.
 > What filtered up over the day is that lua is now shipping in the standard
 > install and the thing might be to set up a golem implementation that
 > configures with lua.

golem needs a new configuration system. That's probably the biggest
problem with it as it stands. (Also one would want to teach it about
.desktop files, but that shouldn't be very hard.) Its advantage is
that it's small, fast, flexible, and (can be) pretty.

I don't think involving Lua is necessary or even desirable;
configuration should not, in general, be Turing-complete.

-- 
David A. Holland
dholland%netbsd.org@localhost