Progman: X11 WM modeled after Program Manager from the Windows 3 era | Hacker News Reader

Progman: X11 WM modeled after Program Manager from the Windows 3 era

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https://github.com/jcs/progman/commit/7b707c32dcf0842c55de29...

https://github.com/jcs/progman/commit/024a5d086657a70b5303d1...

https://github.com/jcs/progman/commit/3a427653be2d5117e162da...

I'd be giving these commit messages as examples of great commit messages.

Honorable mention xd: https://github.com/jcs/progman/commit/bd91f0f091c4656c246e7d...

This is neat but, TBH, i expected a recreation of the actual Program Manager (i.e. the launcher with the groups and icons) :-P

AFAIK back in the 90s there was some (proprietary, i think) Motif based program that looked very similar to Program Manager and some Linux distributions bundled it.

It'd be trivial to make something like it with -e.g.- Lazarus, especially if the subwindows/MDI part isn't needed and instead launch toplevel windows (which IMO is a better idea anyway as you can nest them, something i always felt was missing from the Win3.x Program Manager).

EDIT: for fun i tried to setup a Win3.1 theme for Gtk and put Lazarus (in a separate user account) with this window manager. It looks nice[0] though the WM seems to be lacking support for some common features for setting up window appearance (e.g. the completion window in the screenshot has a frame when it shouldn't and the window doesn't disappear but instead its contents become black - this happens for any window that is expected to remain around but hidden).

https://i.imgur.com/Hpieb0g.png

The company I worked at IXI [1] was the leading provider of Motif. We took the official release, fixed all the bugs, documented it, and sold it with most companies using Unix workstations buying licenses. We also did better versions of the window manager and file/program manager.

We had a product named Wintif that gave the Windows 3 look and feel to any Unix program using Motif, without any code changes to the program. The theory was you would display the Unix programs on a Windows PC running an X server, and they would look and feel like native Windows programs. See a glorious screenshot at [2] where all the programs and window manager are running on Unix using Wintif.

What happened is the Unix workstation market and hence Unix GUI applications rapidly diminished in favour of native Windows applications, with web applications taking off (and what we pivoted to). You'll notice the screenshot includes our version of Mosaic - the first mainstream web browser.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IXI_Limited

[2] https://www.flickr.com/photos/avaragado/5334440376/

Judging from the links in the Wikipedia page and the other reply to my post, i think it was Looking Glass what i remembered, but this was also very interesting (especially the part about modifying Motif to look like Windows 3.1) :-).

Sometimes i wonder how hard it'd be to modify OpenMotif to add theme support.

Caldera Linux included Looking Glass[1] which was vaguely Windows-like and commercial. Not sure if that's what you were thinking of.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looking_Glass_(UNIX_desktop)

Doesn't look that different from Motif/CDE, they were ubiquitous back in the day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Desktop_Environment

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motif_(software)

Yes, Looking Glass is what i had in mind though i think i remembered it closer to the screenshot shown in this post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/vintageunix/comments/ch3xl1/caldera...

I'm a long time tiling window manager user but this is very tempting :D

[edit]

In-case anyone else wanted to know what the exact build dependencies are on Debian, 11 at least:

  build-essential pkg-config libx11-dev libxft-dev libxext-dev libxpm-dev libgdk-pixbuf-xlib-2.0-dev

Does what it says on the tin :) I'm struggling to miss mousing windows around the screen though.

Finally I can fulfill my username's destiny and compile a 32 bit version of this. If this supported virtual desktops I might actually daily drive this on my laptop.

Fun trivia of the day: Program Manager existed as a 32-bit binary from Windows NT 3.1 through Windows XP SP1.

Yes, you could get Windows XP SP1 to boot into Program Manager instead of Explorer if you so desired, and I would wager probably through Windows 10 32-bit too if you copied over the required files.

I actually used that too, and then SP2 blew it away, so I left Windows for Linux.

It says it comes with 10 virtual desktops out of the box. Use <alt> + [1..0] or scroll on the desktop.

I shouldn't post in the middle of the night. My bad. I'll check it out!

Heh, no problems. To err is human, after all. Hope you enjoy it. :)

would be fun on airplanes or coffee shops where bored people will look at your screen and see how many conversations you can strike up :D

I has always assumed Program Manager's window decorations were inspired by Motif but apparently it was the other way around, regarding Presentation Manager; Program Manager's ancestor.

"Motif was directly inspired by the look and feel of the Presentation Manager interface"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentation_Manager#Presentat...

In this day and age I think the mock-3d stuff in Motif looks gaudier than the classic look of both the Win 3.11 interface and the OS/2 Presentation Manager.

i think the "mock 3d" stuff was ultimately inspired by NextStep (1988), although they did it in a classier way than Windows, Motif, or the Mac (either in the late classic (8 or 9) or OSX)

Yeah I made this same point a few days ago on a similar topic about the use of the win95 style in SerenityOS, etc.

I remember back when NeXTstep was new, really lusting over one, but all I had was my little Atari ST.. and spending many hours writing up pretend 3d relief widgets in GFA Basic on it. We were in love with our colour palettes and the illusions they could give :-)

I loved the NeXT interface for years but it feels stylistically over the top to me now. Love the draggable menus tho.

Another GUI that had 3d relief that I feel did it really nice was Sun's OpenLook style. I used olwm as my window manager for many years. Always preferred that over Motif.

I still love the look of NeXTstep. I never liked the scroll bars though even though they make logical sense.

A surprising amount of the original UI survives into macOS.

There's a Computer Chronicles episode somewhere on YouTube (doubtless also on archive.org in higher quality) where a Microsoft rep shows off Windows 3's user interface, and they outright say it looks like Presentation Manager, so it'll prepare users for OS/2. Back when MS hadn't decided to kill OS/2!

IBM was able to kill OS/2 all by itself, regardless of Microsoft's own doings.

They all implement IBM’s Common User Access guidelines:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access

> Optional HiDPI scaling support to magnify icons and buttons

What a beautiful union of past and present:)

Having to manually add programs to the menu is a tradeoff; easier to implement and good for control, but more work to set up as a user.

I appreciate having reasonable keyboard shortcuts by default and supporting adding more.

Of course it has Hot Dog Stand as a theme. :-)

Love the real title bars and buttons. SGI 4dwm had one of the best of this style.

But I happen to like the taskbar from 95+.

Sounds like someone needs to make a "windows 3.1 with calmira" wm: http://www.calmira.net/screenshots/gaby_c.htm

Forgot to mention the draggable window edges that you can see.

Nowadays how well are old-school X11 window managers doing necessary interop with the desktop bus to keep modern GTK/QT apps rendering correctly on 4K HiDPI screens? I was forced to give up on FVWM because tweaking my X resources Xft.dpi and GDK_SCALE settings for one app such as firefox in order to get it rendering correctly on a 4K screen would break other apps. Firefox only seemed to do HiDPI correctly when run under a full GNOME desktop that provides the dbus messages it is assuming to set the 200% font size and UI scale correctly. Is there a way to run an old-school X11 WM now that allows snaps/flatpacks/GNOME-bloat dbus apps to run without issue with 200% scaling on 4K screens?

I wonder if there's a pixel-perfect Win95 WM out there.

This poor soul has been maintaining Fvwm95 all on their own: https://flaterco.com/util/index.html

XFCE total conversion https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

Chicago was the code name for the development version of the highly anticipated Windows95

This is the window managing part which handles decoration and displays running applications as desktop icons if minimized.

But where is the Program Manager?

I suspect this commit is for you :) https://github.com/jcs/progman/commit/bd91f0f091c4656c246e7d...

Thanks. :)

The developer surely knew that there would be people that asked for the Program Manager, because it wasn't only a name for the desktop itself (like the Explorer with additional file manager windows). It was Windows. If you closed the Program Manager application, you were prompted a message box "Wanna exit Windows?"

So there's a difference between implementing Windows 3 style desktop, and implementing the Program Manager (as kind of an early Start Menu).

Oh I agree, indeed PM can be replaced by Calmira but the windows will look the same

If only it could have the OS/2 1.3 look…

Isn't that literally just slightly different colors? I don't remember meaningful differences between OS/2 1.3 and the Windows 3 line. I always thought that was part of why WinOS2 worked well: the Win32 apps looked like the old OS/2 apps, both giving them familiarity and emphasizing they were old.

I was curious about this and looked it up for anyone else who wants to see too: https://www.os2museum.com/wp/os2-history/os2-1-2-and-1-3/

I never used OS/2 and most of what I’ve seen were from the final versions, so I had no idea it basically looked like Windows 3.x in the earliest versions.

It's the other way around. Windows 3.x looked like OS/2 1.x

The window borders were grey rather than black. That made a huge difference in the subtleness of the contours. The resizable borders were a bit thinner, IIRC (could be the grey outlines though.

I need to play with it for a while.

Visible, discoverable UI control elements are (were?) such a nice thing. (I believe Apple also once endorsed those principles... until they decided to abandon them.)

I wish there were a way of turning visible controls back on in macOS/Windows/Ubuntu. Perhaps KDE still has them?

This is basically how the first releases of fvwm worked :) in fact most early window managers.

Most early window managers, including fvwm, were configurable, with few hardcoded defaults.

Would love a wm with the BeOS look

Well, not a wm, but would a theme for XFCE interest you? https://old.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/90gx5u/xfce4_beos...

The /r/unixporn is a really weird place, in this case it's XFCE, so I feel like it makes more sense, but the most riced up desktops people post are always Sway, i3, dwm and similar. They are minimalist window managers, yet people go out of their way to customize them.

Can we avoid xenophobic slangs please?

Sure, wasn't actually aware that it was xenophobic, still not really sure why it is. What you would suggest as an equally colorful and descriptive?

I'm Japanese, assuming that guy was referring to the use of "rice" I can advise you to just ignore him. You're fine, food isn't racist.

I assume you're referring to "rice". In the car scene, it stands for "race inspired cosmetic enhancement" and it's typically used to refer to things that make a car look fast without actually making it so. (Think big spoilers, non-functional intake scoops, etc.).

The term is used here to express a similar sentiment; a desktop environment that's made to take pretty screenshots but not necessarily be more functional, or enhance a certain workflow.

That’s a post hoc acryonym. The phrases like “rice rocket”, “rice burner”, etc. were applied to Japanese cars and motorcycles when those really started putting American companies and their enthusiast communities on the defensive. Whether or not that was an insult is debatable but the meaning was focused on Japan (whose business dominance was feared in the 1980s and early 90s).

Southern California had an Asian car culture which was all about customizing mostly Japanese imports, and there was a lot of debate in the 90s about the exact racial dynamics there (like other terms, some outsiders used it as an insult and some insiders wore it as a badge of pride). For fans of the early web, I’m amused to see this site is still around probably a quarter of a century after the last time I visited:

http://www.riceboypage.com/what_is_riceboy/

Hmm, so what do you suggest then?

"juiced up"? Nah, promotes (or offends users of) steroids.

"tarted up"? Nah. #metoo

"jazzed up"? Nah. Cultural appropriation.

Ok, "riced" it is then ...

Almost every skinnable WM has a BeOS theme.

Pekwm has my favourite BeOS theme (https://www.pekwm.se/themes/benu.html) because it supports window grouping flawlessly, which turns every window into a potential tab just by dragging.

On a side note, I wonder if Wayland made it more difficult to have this kind of silly experimentation. X11, despite the legendary bad code quality, is a big leverage for lone coder.

Looks nice and simple (a good thing, not a bad thing) -- which would make it excellent for educational purposes (as well as tiny/embedded and/or highly secure systems)!

Kudos on the work!

Great job!

It would surprisingly fit some 2020s aesthetic trends (or maybe we're just cycling)

I approve of this UI.

Reminds me a bit of icewm. Very nice work.

I have used Mac laptops as my daily driver for the last ten years after being a ride-or-die Linux guy for the 15 years before that.

I’m still more comfortable on Linux systems, though. Some things I dearly miss, in no particular order:

1) complete control over window management, an embarrassment of riches in terms of amazing and wacky window managers

2) {s,p, (and much later) d}trace; there are probably similar tools on Mac but I don’t need them badly enough to find and learn them —- but I know just enough about them in Linux-land to investigate frustrating things

... I thought there would be more when I started typing, but that might be it.

Try this. https://github.com/chipsenkbeil/choose

macOS has had DTrace for ages.

Resizing handles you can get a grip on.

Yaay!!

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