Re: Gnustep Window Manager

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi James,

On 03/18/13 22:45, James Carthew wrote:
> Hi guys, I'm interested in using GNUstep as a desktop environment and 
> I'd like to make the system a bit more integrated with the window 
> manager etc. I've noticed that there are three ways to use the GUI 
> environment as Windows style, Mac OSX style and as the older NEXT 
> stye, but the Window managers available only seem to cater for the 
> Windows or NEXT styles of window management. I'd like to write a newer 
> window manager that handles configuration using the Defaults system 
> and which would support better integration/awareness of the horizontal 
> menu bar when it's enabled. Would anyone else be interested in this 
> project?
What is exactly your need and your desire? Do you want windowmaker and 
GS to blend better and what "features" do you need in windowmaker? O do 
you want GS to blend in environment X, where is is gnome, unity, 
whatever? Usually those will have their windowmanager.

Personally I can live quite well with WindowMaker, it is suboptimal, in 
that it uses WINGs and essentially the only thing I miss would be a 
preferences app written in GNUstep itself. In al later stage, use GS to 
"draw" things in windowmaker (like its menus) using GNUste, so that you 
would end up having only "one" draw code, thus that colors, fonts and 
themes would apply altogether.
But I put these projects in the "low priority" list for now.

I may ad also that GS could do almost without windowmanager, the support 
it needs is very minimal: it can draw its own window decorations. It 
needs support in  X11 for window ordering, events, focus. But you still 
want to have a "full" windowmanager otherwise you could not have other 
applications running along (e.g. Firefox)

Riccardo