These eyes might not have seen the birth of stars, or the Tannhauser
gate, but I've seen a lot of window managers for the X11 system come
and go.
When I started using Linux, there already were quite some options
available. As with some systems now, your basic option was 'twm',
"Tom's Window Manager". A rather weird flat look (hey, it wasn't en
vogue back then), resizing looked unfamiliar, with a gridded pattern
overlayed instead of live content or a simple rectangle.
The usual "upgrade" in those days was fvwm. I'm not quite sure, but
I think the rewrite to "fvwm2" was either upcoming or still in
progress.
Anyways, it had a "3D" window look. so you go something that came
closer to what you saw back then on Windows or OS/2 (or commercial
Unices, if that was your background). Also lots of customization,
a place to store your minified windows etc.
So for a lon time, this was the "gold standard" of window managers on
Linux. I remember playing with a few promising alternatives, like gwm
(I printed a huuuge manual for that on my manual feed printer), which
allowed you to customize the look and feel en detail, and you had
access to a whole scripting language (scheme) for determining the
behavior.
Fvwm had a whole cottage industry of hacks based upon it, and I stuck
with a few of them for a while - you got some neat new look out of it,
but still could use the same way to specify your program menus (left
mouse button on the desktop window, no fancy taskbars or docks).
Two that stuck out would've been "bowman", the first window manager
that visually approximated the NextStep interface - these days that's
done by AfterStep and WindowMaker, but let's not forget the first one.
The other was the first version of Enlightenment, which started out
as a fvwm hack and then went fully second-system effect...
This coincided with a lot of graphical modifications to standard UI
toolkits. The "Athena Widgets" that came standard with X11 were the
main target - you had one that went NextStep again, but also one that
enabled you to use background images for *everything*. There were
marble backdrops everywhere, all in glorious 8 bit with limited
transparency. The first terminals to support that came around back
then, too (including fake transparency, where you just grap the
background image of the desktop window and use that).
Englightenment with that Steampunk theme was quite something, very
unlike what you saw on other systems.
Personally, I went a bit more minimamlistic at the time. The main
ancestor of that specific trend was "9wm", a window manager that
tried to emulate the windowing system of the "Plan 9" operating
system. Which meant no title bars! No title text, no maximize or
close button!
Lots of hacks based on that. w9wm added virtual desktops, lwm and
aewm added simple title bars again. I think aewm itself spawned a
lot of related window managers, mostly tweaking the way the title
bars looked and behaved.
Next came the tiling window managers. This is where I'm leaving the
picture a bit. I did use "larswm", which was one of the first to
bring this windowing paradigm to the Linux desktop. But then I left
for the aqua-bluer pastures of Mac for quite a while, and whenever
I installed Linux for work purposes or experimentation, I stuck with
conventional window managers again - Mac's Expose beat most window
managing paradigms, and for my use cases occassionally having to
resize a window manually wasn't too cumbersome. Multiple monitors,
maybe a second monitor - that was all I needed. For terminal multi-
plexing, there also was screen.
I got comfortable with i3wm a bit later, but again, it felt more like
playing around with that for the sake of it, no real productivity
gain (There's a lot of "feel" here, though. Studies have shown that
mousing might take less time, but doing it via keyboard shortcuts
makes it feel like conscious, intentional activity and not wasted
time moving around a cursor).
These days, in my main Linux system (used for gaming, mostly), I stuck
with the default Xfce install. Decent enough file manager, themes for
the window manager that makes it somehwat palatable.
WHY AM I WRITING ALL THIS?
When embaring on the old computer challenge, I didn't want to mess
aroudn with this too much. I planned to put in one of my favorites
from the "Olden Times" on there and just stick with that, constrain
my experimentation to other fiels.
That old staple being "lwm", the "lightweight window manager". Based
on 9wm, but with a title bar. One that approximated another piece of
Plan 9 technology, the acme editor. I found that the current version
(which I had to install by hand, no package for Alpine) had quite a
few "enhancements", including icons in the title bar and more colors.
All changed with settings, so it went quite okay. I managed windows
by hiding the ones I don't use at the time (they then only appear in
the window menu, no "debris" on the desktop window).
Simple. Until the window manager crashed. Apparently I can't run the
Tcl/Tk interpreter "wish", without everything going broke. In the long
run probably worth a bug report or fixing it myself, but what to do
this week? The default config of fvwm was a bit too fancy, and I didn't
want to spend too much time fiddling around with that.
I tried w9wm again, and found that I even got my name in the README,
apparently I submitted some bugs years ago. Huh.
But I wanted titlebars, and relatively normal resizing.
Currently I'm using "windowlab", which is another of those 9wm/aewm
based window managers. It has some interesting paradigms, and right
now I'm not sure whether those are actually good, or a hindrance on
my way towards "stacking wm simplicity".
- There's a honking big "taskbar" at the top, which is used to switch
between windows. It does this in a very neat "swipe across screen"
way, but do I need it?
- Resizing is "optimized". You hold the Alt key and "shove" against a
side of the window. Wile doing that, the window content is grayed out.
Meh. It's better than the w9wm way, where you just reshape a outlined
rectangle, but is it better than just grabbing a window edge?
- Focus is click to focus, with some exceptions (taskbar, Alt-Tab).
I commited to using the mouse, so focus on hover seemed a bit simpler
in that regard.
I'm sticking with this for a while, but might switch back to something
"boring" soon. Maybe mwm? Or writing a simple fvwm config?
OTHER DEVELOPMENTS
- I'm using elinks more for browsing web pages, sticking with lynx for
gopher.
- Switching between Nedit and the command-line Joe editor for text
editing purposes. Mostly because joe seems a bit more immediate called
from the shell. I guess with a graphical file manager this would be
different, but my favorite "low tech" one - Rox Filer - isn't
available on Alpine and a bit of a hassle to compile oneself.
- Boy, compiling C++ code on this machine is slow. Was it that slow back
in the days when triple-digit Mhz and 512 MB were normal? Maybe it's
better when I'm doing more incrementally. I wouldn't even want to try
even slower compilers like Rust on this setup.
- Listening to music suffers from the available space, with my 4 Gig
"hard drive". It also suffers a bit from my lack of preparation for
this challenge, as I could've used the time to save some media on
external storage - I currently have no NAS set up in this apartment.
So I could download a few albums from bandcamp, probably works fine
enough with elinks. Then put them on an USB stick.
Or, well, I could just use mpg123 to listen to some internet radio.
The French "Morow" prog rock station is quite entertaining, and one
of the few I remember from my radio.garden favorites list.
PLANS FOR THE WEEKEND
It's going to be hot here. So I'm probably be a bit of a homebody
again. I'm spending some time working on my partner's homepage, which
I classify as "work" and thus will do with another system (10+ years
old, but luxurious amounts of RAM and semi-recent MacOS).
I'll do some GUI development on the old machine, trying to get to
grips with Tcl/Tk again, but maybe also some other smaller GUI
libraries that work without desktop environments and OpenGL. Due to
my disappointment with C++ here, maybe I'll try Motif and XForms
again - two libraries that weren't good choices in the 90s, as
both had bad licenses. And then gtk/qt were just too popular...
