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Comment by badsectoracula | Hacker News Reader

I might be wrong, but i do not think NeXTStep had dockapps, i think the idea comes from older WMs which allowed X11 windows to be "swallowed" inside panels and Window Maker provided the same functionality in a NeXTStep-ish way (dockapps are just small windows nested inside a frame box around them).

Actually at some point in recent years i used NeXTStep and having being using Window Maker for many years by that point, i felt a bit of an uncanny valley effect: what i was looking at the screen felt very familiar but still somewhat "wrong" and a ton of what i was used to didn't work (or worked in a different way) :-P. It made me realize what the people around the mid-2000s who tried various Aqua-like themes on GNOME 2, etc and said that it looks off/wrong were feeling like :-P.

EDIT: also i think Window Maker is not the only window manager that supports/uses dockapps. I think FVWM and Afterstep can also use the same dockapps.

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Fluxbox also has first class support for Dockapps. They're a great pairing.

An old screengrab to prove my point: https://www.thran.uk/img/desktop-aug-21.jpg. I'm especially fond of the VU-meter style ethernet traffic monitor, 'wmnd'.

Find dockapps here: https://www.dockapps.net/

Fluxbox is awesome.

I used to use it on hardware-limited machines at first, then started to prefer it for its minimalism.

That screenshot makes me want to use Fluxbox, it looks great!

It's very usable when paired with PcManFM, and there are a plethora of themes available. Customising is done by an intuitive config file. There are tools to auto-generate the application menu, so you don't need to toil after installing a new program.

The hardest part was setting up automount to handle my network drives and USB drives - no gvfs here! A result you'll welcome if you like sane paths to mountpoints.

That's useful information, huge thank you!

I use Fluxbox since the first version. Very easy to customize. I've just an issue with Firefox, the Firefox windows doesn't want to play with Fluxbox (on Debian)...

I think this is a bug in upgrade path, I have my normal profile with this problem (and a lot of accumulated things) but if I launch Firefox with a fresh profile then it works nice.

> I might be wrong, but i do not think NeXTStep had dockapps, i think the idea comes from older WMs which allowed X11 windows to be "swallowed" inside panels and Window Maker provided the same functionality in a NeXTStep-ish way (dockapps are just small windows nested inside a frame box around them).

According to my computer history knowledge, NeXTSTEP version 0.8 introduced the dock in 1988.

At the launch, Steve Jobs said: “The dock — It turns out that, when you’re running applications, things can get lost. These icons can get hidden and you might want to read your mail at a moment’s notice. So we allow you to take any icon and take it over to any one of these dock positions and it’ll snap in and dock. And the minute it docks, nothing can go in front of it. And so it’s a place to always have the applications that you use handy. You can customize it any way you want to, and nothing will ever keep these things from being a glance away. That’s what the dock’s all about. And if you decide that you need to use that right part of the screen for an awfully big window, and you don’t want to undock things, you can just slide it down and everything, but the little logo will go off the screen.”

https://youtu.be/92NNyd3m79I?si=PjcfOEhf2-S-QzB1

That's a different thing, though. Obviously NeXTStep had a dock for apps. That was probably its primary influence on UI design and why OSX/MacOS has an dock. That's different than "dockapps" which are programs that live in the dock which aren't just normal programs. The closest thing to that would be the clock/calendar app of NeXTStep (which does exist as a dockapp for WindowMaker)

As I understood it, the dockapps of the Windowmaker world were basically a work-around for the fact that the X11 had no concept of a dock icon (or a dock at all, for that matter). On Nextstep, the normal Mail app would show status in its dock icon, much like Mail.app does on macOS today, the calendar app would show event reminders in its dock icon, etc. Your X11 mail app wouldn’t know that there was such a thing as a dock, so you had to run a separate little app to get the “biff” function in the dock. Then the Windowmaker afficionados took the concept and ran with it, creating lots of little apps that had nothing but a dock icon, a thing that didn’t really exist on Nextstep.

I think GNUMail and some GNUStep software supported notifications as dockapps. Such as the number of new mail messagges.

Fun fact: though years after WMaker/AfterStep were already a thing, the Mac OS X Developer Previews, Public Beta, and 10.0 had “Docklets” that worked somewhat similarly. The default Dock for a new user contained one for adjusting Monitor resolution and color depth. They were deprecated almost immediately when the MenuItem API was added to Mac OS X 10.1

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