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Comment by HeckFeck | Hacker News Reader

Continuing on today's theme of GNUstep, here is a modern and maintained attempt to build a full desktop environment atop GNUstep.

And before the question arises: "Workspace is NOT WindowMaker... Workspace is written from scratch."

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> Workspace is NOT WindowMaker... Workspace is written from scratch

Kinda, but not exactly and for some reason the author has always been vague when it comes to that.

Nextspace's Workspace has been written "from scratch" in the sense that it is a new (sub)project, however it is meant to be the full desktop experience instead of just a window manager. The window management part however is based on a fork of Window Maker, you can find the relevant files (with their copyrights, etc) under Applications/Workspace/WM. The build system has changed to Nextspace's (which seems to be just GNU make) and some glue code with the rest of the system is made.

Is there any particular reason why GNUstep is getting so much attention today, or are people just posting all these things in response to each other?

I don't know, but I think GNUstep deserves more appreciation and use.

Modern hardware is drastically more powerful than what NeXT had to work with, yet it often bogs down just trying to implement a usable and responsive GUI.

Sadly my work laptop is on Ubuntu (macOS at home) GNUstep inspired me to try Chicago 95, so I will probably go with that later on... Nextspace looks amazing tho'

Thanks for the mention of Chicago95! I hadn't heard of it before, looks like just what I wanted to try. The various early windows themes for things like icewm left me wanting a bit more "authenticity".

But isn't it painfully wrong on the title bar size/font, the highlight around icons, etc? If this is the better one, I can't imagine the alternatives...

https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95/blob/master/Screensho...

The titlebar size is fine, however the title is a pixel off vertically as is the icon too. The biggest issue i can see in the screenshot is the menubar spacing being too large and the scrollbar's top/left bevel lines using the "button shadow" instead of "button" color. In addition the bevel lines use the wrong overlap in the corner. For some reason this is only the case for the first button (up, left) and the second button (bottom, right) looks correct. The icon views (small and large) in lists also use too much spacing around the contents as well as between the icons and the icon captions in the desktop also use too much padding. Finally the window frame seems to also have too much padding between the bevel and the actual window contents (i.e. in the file manager views the outer bevel lines for the tree and icons should align with the titlebar, but here they are pushed a couple of pixels inside). Ah yeah, also the shortcut icon overlay seems too scaled down and blurry for some reason.

These are what i noticed from the screenshot. They're fixable for the most part though, i had played around with Chigago95 at the past to make it a bit more faithful. The biggest effort was modifying Gtk's theme engine to remove the outline from the menu bar :-P. And TBH i think that for pixel perfect accuracy you'd need to modify some code, which goes a bit outside the scope of a theme.

Exactly. Nearly but not quite right.

I am in no way nostalgic for 1990s OSes -- I remember the pain too vividly -- but I think this look would be like a hangnail or a toothache: just wrong enough to be constantly irritating.

Now, 1980s OSes, when stuff was still a challenge, now that was fun. :-D

"Workspace is written from scratch. Some WindowMaker code is a part of Workspace (as well as configuration defaults) to provide window management functions. The code is tightly coupled with Workspace to provide seamless intergation. Configurable parameters of the integrated WindowMaker are spread across Workspace's Preferences and Preferences application."

The wiki explicitly mentions forking WindowMaker "with numerous fixes, enhancements":

https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace/wiki/Architecture-a...

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