On Wed, Jul 02, 2008, Johan Vromans wrote about "[ctwm] Time to move on": >... > I cannot remember exactly when I first met Ctwm. > My oldest backups date from 1993, and at that time I was using Ctwm > 3.0beta. I know that before I switched to Ctwm I tried mwm, gwm, twm, > vtwm and tvtwm. For months, sometimes longer. All with varying levels > of satisfaction. But nothing compared to the more than 15 years I've > been using Ctwm. > > For the past several years I've been struggling with some of the > problems of Ctwm, and, more important, with its inability to keep up > with modern desktop environments. No, I'm not complaining. Several > volunteers have done an incredibly good job on Ctwm. But apparently > these problems were to hard to tackle, and I myself was not able to do > it either. > > Recently I came across the OpenBox window manager. Lean, flexible and >...
Hi, The beginning of my experience is similar to yours: I started using X-Windows in 1991, starting with twm and then going through vtwm, tvtwm, mwm, olwm, swm (not necessarily in that order) until a couple of years later I settled on ctwm, which I've been using ever since. However, the end of our stories is different - I have not left ctwm (yet). Unlike you, I have not seen ctwm's "inability to keep up with modern desktop environment". What I've seen is something different: application writers have become so lazy that they don't bother any more to check if their application works on all Windows managers. For example, for over a year OpenOffice's menus didn't work well in ctwm - not because ctwm doesn't keep up with modern practices, but because OpenOffice didn't care that their menus can't work in any window manager with the traditional "focus follows mouse" setting. The situation is indeed worst with KDE and Gnome applications, because these applications more-or-less assume that they are running in their own "desktop environment", and never have to be tested with different window managers or setups. But even with those applications, I hardly ever saw any significant problem. Moreover, originally X-Windows had a beautiful design separating the functionality to separate programs. A window manager is just a normal X program that provides several services (for decorating windows, moving them, etc.) as specified in the ICCCM. You could have other programs that do other things - e.g., one program be panel, another be a print manager, a third being a session manager, and so on. If Gnome and KDE decided they want all these things (or some of them) to be bundled into one program, why do we have to follow suite? Can't we have a "session manager" separate from the "window manager", for example? In short, I guess what I'm looking for is a more concrete list of how ctwm fails to keep up with modern desktop environments. I'm not promising I can do anything to help fix this - but maybe you can convince me to also try this OpenBox :-) -- Nadav Har'El | Monday, Jul 14 2008, 11 Tammuz 5768 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |----------------------------------------- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |Attention: There will be a rain dance http://nadav.harel.org.il |Friday night, weather permitting.
