Comparison of X Window Managers
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Here are two items that should be doable with compositing. First, when giving a presentation with an external monitor, I'd like to tag specific windows to be mirrored (and scaled, if appropriate) on the secondary monitor. That way I can still be messing with my instant messages or email in private (which you can't do if you are mirroring your whole screen), yet be able to easily work with content that the audience is also viewing (by no having to shift my head from my laptop screen up to the projector all the time). This would be similar to using online meeting software where you share specific windows.
The second item, that you can sort of do now but not cleanly, is have multiple mice and keyboards, so that a mouse that selects a given window gives its associated keyboard input focus to that window. While the other mouse/keyboard combo is working with a different window. This would be great for pair programming, especially with a multi-windowed shared buffer editor (like what Emacs can do).
You can do this now, with some editing in the X config file, but there is no indication on the screen which window currently is focused to which keyboard -- this can be accomplished with the WM changing the window border or title bar color as appropriate.
Why "instead"? Best would be to have both. Eye candy is an important feature. No need to sacrifice one to get the other.
It does not need to involve any external motivations.
Inferring form what you wrote, I think your working definition of marketing is wrong. Maybe you can clarify what you mean by "marketing"?
I am also unsure what you mean with "signaling". If you mean communication with the user via visual cues, than I would say signaling is an important feature.
Eye-candy is important with many things made for humans, not just computer displays.
I feel like the sweet spot for malleability was Win95-era theming. You could adjust the color of everything, and the typeface of everything, and that was it.
I am just so, so puzzled by this I had to type out this comment. Ignoring functionality, accessibility and all that, does anyone actually think it looked aesthetically pleasing, and I don't mean that in a 20-years-after nostalgic vaporwave way? Why is there a sudden wave against things being allowed to look nice and pleasing to the eye?
The UI might not have been perfect, but they gave an interface that provided a decent feedback while getting out of the way if you wanted to get work done.
Now if this is against being allowed to look pleasing? That depends on what you are comparing against, of course. Next and osx i could live with equally well, i guess. Modern win10, otoh, should be shot.
But thats my opinion. Do on your PC whatever you want.
I'd say it is the other way around. With Wayland you'd need buy-in from the entire stack since in Wayland everything needs to be implemented in the compositor. With X all you need is a compositor (not necessary even your window manager, it can be a separate compositor) that ignores the area of one monitor when compositing and instead renders duplicates of the tagged windows there. You can keep using everything else you were already using.
If you simply mirrored redirected windows in triplicate all over the place in the compositor, it wouldn't magically make the window manager and X server aware of all those areas as being windows to manage and route events at. You'd just have these ghost windows that can't be directly interacted with as first-class windows.
But that is what the GP asked for, not full duplication.
Though if you want duplication it might be possible by creating a window over the duplicated area that the compositor does not render but still grabs all input events that are then forwarded to the original windows via XSendEvent.
You could start another X server for the secondary display and drive it via vnc or something like that. It's a different approach, but checks most (all?) Of the boxes.
A long, long time ago -- but still quite some time after it stopped being (too) regularly maintained -- I emailed Matt Chapman to ask him to include my WM in the list. He never answered, thank God, that was my first piece of non-trivial X11 code and it was absolutely gruesome, I don't know what the hell I was thinking.
LXQT does its job for me these days. It's not the most polished but at least it doesn't go out of its way to make my desktop look and act like a tablet so I'm happy with it.
I've been toying with writing a Wayland compositor that does wmii-like tiling, but can also do proper floating window management, but I have to wait for things to settle on the Wayland front before writing anything that's useful...
Edit: whoever downvoted you clearly never had a few hours of fun on a Friday night tweaking FVWM only to find out it's 4 AM now and oh crap it's also Monday!
I'm still sorry about my FVWM config. It was almost perfect. I should search for it in backups.
I still in theory maintain one of mine (wmx), and this thread just prompted me to go and fix a few warnings that newer compilers come up with. Egads, there's some grubby code in there.
Writing your own web framework?
Nowadays I'm just using gnome with pretty much default configs.
But now I'm using i3, as managing haskell crap is kind of a pita.
I'm not quite shore what the BSD people are planning. Do they plan on keeping a fork of Xorg or eventually trying to port Wayland to FreeBSD/OpenBSD/et. al.?
Finally unlike Python 2 vs 3 the difference between Xorg and Wayland is tremendous, so i can easily see people who will be willing to fork it to continue development.
No, it will not. Xwayland will likely be deprecated and removed in the coming years. The rationale being that nobody uses any Athena or Motif programs anymore and all of the toolkits that matter to modern desktops will have Wayland backends already.
Xwayland may kick around for really old apps but it will not be maintained at all and you will be expected to forward-port your software to Wayland.
But more likely, they will need to be run on some ancient OS or distro version and thus containerized or virtualized anyway.
Also since it got open sourced (properly), there are more people using Motif applications nowadays than 10 years ago. And there are other toolkits that target X outside of Athena and Motif.
And besides, "removed"? Removed from where? Xorg is just a historical name nowadays, what was called Xorg is a bunch of independent packages and the X server is a package by itself. The only way "removed" would apply here is removing the Wayland backend from the X server. Which isn't impossible, but after all the work that went into it, doesn't make sense.
I'll use KDE/gnome from time to time for very specific things, but I could never go back to using them generally. That being said, I always install KDE to get some of the tools, such as Konsole.
I think it’s a shame you can’t get something like i3 on OSX or Windows. It’s a primary reason I stick to Linux.
I presume you mean more than just tiling? As Amethyst [1] gives you that on macOS.
This is neat! Are you writing this as some sort of Chrome Extension or forking Ash?
This extension is a window manager that mimics Amethyst for OSX: https://github.com/brockgr/chrometile
It can give an idea of what's possible with the chrome.windows API.
However I'm currently trying w9wm again; I have a slightly-hacked version that I've used on and off for about a decade and it's always fun to return to.
twm -> olwm -> mwm
I then stopped faffing about with such things (after spending huge amounts of time getting configuration just so) and over the years started increasingly just to go with defaults for most things.
What's getting it even close to that high? Even allowing for more features and some serious bloat I'd expect modern Linux with XFCE to fit inside 250MB, not counting file cache and such.
I use cwm now though because it just gets out of the way and does it’s job.
It has very few dependancies, it’s definitely one of the easier packages to build yourself.
(from the '90's anyway.)
I use ratpoison and GNU screen.
These wikipedia lists can be quite helpful, even if they are often out of date and incomplete.
Only using 3 pages of RAM is pretty good
still the GUI for embedded linux device is lacking, Android unifies that but it's more for phones loaded with a huge chunk of bloat-ware for other non-phone use cases.
I have been looking for embedded-linux-GUI for a long while, but I'm happy with gnome/lxde on Desktops.
So far quite a lot of work remains to bring them up to date.
It finally acquired most of the essential window management features of WMaker, such as Meta-R/L-Mouse to move or resize the window by clicking anywhere into it or shading windows.
However I still miss selecting multiple windows with a rubber band and then moving them to a different virtual desktop together, or the dock apps. I still can't find a proper widget which displays the network activity or something like wmforkplop to show the general system load.