Re: Reasons for a GStep windowmanager

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On Sat, 6 Jan 2001, Georgios Rizell Dimitroglou wrote:

> Hi,
> I'm currently using WindowMaker, and I (like most of you) think it's very
> good. But it's not the ideal window manager for GNUstep. Like every other wm
> project for linux it's been filled up with more and more functions. I don't
> know why every linux project involves creating completely new toolkits and
> environments, but I hope GNUstep is going to change that in the future.

Toolkits mean WINGs? I think Dan just explain that in his post.

> That's why GS shouldn't depend on a windowmanager such as WindowMaker. The
> only thing GNUstep needs is an application which draws window-titles and
> manages the desktop. It needs a _window_manager_. Not a single piece of
> X11-code for drawing docks, buttons, menues, images or anything.
> 
> Remember, I don't think WindowMaker is a bad application. It's perfect as an
> X11 window manager which tries to emulate a NEXTSTEP look and feel. But as
> the GS-wm it's far to big and advanced.

I don't know if our project is too big and too advance. Though.. if you
don't want to use anything then you just don't use it. Disable WMaker's
appicon support, dock, clip and don't use any menu. It won't waste your
memory, on-demand-paging will help you with this.

> Let's make a small, fast, objc-written, and modular wm for GNUstep.. or? :-)

That may sound like a nice idea to me if you are going to run only GNUstep
applications. But it seems like GNUstep is not the only existing
environment. What will you have to do after making new window manager
in Objective-C is adding GNOME, KDE and other existing environments
supports. What if others want to use GNUstep in their window managers that
is not GS-wm while GNUstep can't corperate with a window manager that
aims to support GNUstep as its major environment yet?

However, I personally don't see much benefit from using Objective-C to
write a window manager. Instead, using GNUstep to write a window manager
sounds like a better idea to me and when GNUstep is ready and we met the
dead end of the corperation between both systems, I'm sure we are happy to
start such a thing if nobody didn't get anything done nicely yet.

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