OpenBSD Journal

x11/wmii, the "window manager improved 2"

Contributed by mbalmer on from the windows-need-managers dept.

Tobias Ulmer made a port of wmii, a dynamic window manager for X11:

wmii is a dynamic window manager for X11. It supports classic and dynamic window management with extended keyboard, mouse, and filesystem based remote control. It replaces the workspace paradigm with a new tagging approach.

x11/wmii has been imported to our ports tree. See http://wmii.de for more details on wmii.

(Comments are closed)

Comments

  1. By Anonymous Coward (84.130.134.215) on

    Personally, this is my window manager of choice. Minimalistic and nice to control, by keyboard. In my opinion there is nothing better out there.

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (84.188.231.42) on

      > Personally, this is my window manager of choice. Minimalistic and nice to control, by keyboard. In my opinion there is nothing better out there.

      Next time maybe Garbe sends his Port directly to ports@...
      Just to mention: wmii is also developed on OpenBSD ;)
      But that`s the only real good stuff. :-D

      It`s neat to know that you don`t need all the useless Plan9-Stuff anymore and that wmii decided even to switch back to sh (from rc-Shell). :)

      Comments

      1. By Anonymous Coward (82.71.120.74) on

        > Just to mention: wmii is also developed on OpenBSD ;)

        AFAIK, garbeam uses Ubuntu, not OpenBSD.

        Comments

        1. By Anonymous Coward (84.188.231.42) on

          > > Just to mention: wmii is also developed on OpenBSD ;)
          >
          > AFAIK, garbeam uses Ubuntu, not OpenBSD.

          Ask him about "xxiii" but that`s now kind of oftopic so let us end that discussion. :-)

    2. By Anonymous Coward (222.126.7.222) on

      personally i love wmii, but for now, cwm is my window manager of choice :-)

      http://monkey.org/~marius/pages/?page=cwm

  2. By Anonymous Coward (134.58.253.131) on

    I've been using ion for a while now, and I totally love it.
    My only gripe about is that I sometimes find that manually positioning all the frames like I want them takes too much time.
    Maybe wmii does this better, it sure looks promising.

    I'll certainly give it a try :-)
    Thanks for this announcement, it's always nice to learn about new software!

  3. By Anonymous Coward (156.34.219.26) on

    While virtually everyone probably takes the 20s necessary to install their favourite desktop, it has occurred to me that the default desktop scheme in OpenBSD is starting to look a little long in the tooth. It would take very little effort to spruce up its functionality and appearence, and importing a new window manager is certainly one possible way to do this. Is there a particular reason the desktop hasn't received attention (such as a particular developer(s) being rather fond of the current scheme), or is it mostly just indifference stemming from the reason I layed out in my opening statement?

    I wonder, would Theo and the other developers even consider something as simple and harmless as a community contributed .fvwmrc file? Or is this just an absolute non-starter.

    Comments

    1. By Nate (65.95.243.231) on

      I think the colours of the fvwm theme should actually be set to link with the OpenBSD release de jour - mind you I think the same should be done for the various other windowmanagers and such, get a nice puffy theme for things like GNOME and XFCE that is set to default for each release.

      Though I suppose that is a bit of extra work that the port maintainers would have to decide is worth the time.

      Comments

      1. By Anonymous Coward (201.144.5.205) on

        I donīt say this to offend, but I think this idea may be a waste of time. In terms of priorities Iīd much prefer a system that works well over one that changes colors every six months. Many (most?) of us also customize the WMs and appearances so it wouldnīt really matter anyway.

        Comments

        1. By Nate (65.95.243.231) on

          > I donīt say this to offend, but I think this idea may be a waste of time. In terms of priorities Iīd much prefer a system that works well over one that changes colors every six months. Many (most?) of us also customize the WMs and appearances so it wouldnīt really matter anyway.

          Most port maintainers aren't developers, so it's not a waste of development time - at worst it is a waste of port maintainer time and at best it gives people a distinctly OpenBSD feel to their first boot.

          And if such an OpenBSD theme is done correctly, it won't be so disgusting that everyone changes it first thing.

          People do look for OpenBSD based wallpapers, why not have those in place already and have themes made to match those wallpapers for the various window managers and desktop environments?

      2. By Menace III Society (71.126.108.174) menace3society@gmail.com on

        I think we should create a theme that exclusively uses pictures of puffy for everything. The minimize button is puffy, the scroll bar is puffy, the cursor is puffy... it would give everyone the impression that OpenBSD is a "true" desktop OS like Ubuntu or something.

    2. By Anonymous Coward (82.44.215.41) on

      > .. it has occurred to me that the default desktop scheme in OpenBSD is starting to look a little long in the tooth.

      I have to say I think there is a good reason for the basic nature of the provided X environment.

      This install suits all machines and architectures running OpenBSD that you run X on. At the end of the day it means more to me that when you install OpenBSD on anything you get exactly the same environment with the same settings and that it is a sensible choice for the great range of hardware that OpenBSD supports (including the Zaurus). - Lets not go the way of the software vendors that obviously have shares in HW companies and make each successive version of the OS demand higher and higher spec machines by making the base installation more resource demanding.

      Comments

      1. By Anonymous Coward (84.188.231.42) on

        >Lets not go the way of the software vendors that obviously have shares in >HW companies and make each successive version of the OS demand higher >and higher spec machines by making the base installation more resource >demanding.

        wmii was already shown to some developers at WTH and I don`t think Theo will include wmii and drop fvwm. :-)
        but wmii uses less res. then fvwm and wmii is "faster" too. :-)
        I just wanted to mention this.

        So using less memory and cpu is somethign wich may affect f.e. Zaurus users. much more then opteron-Guys. :)

        Comments

        1. By Anonymous Coward (82.44.215.41) on

          > So using less memory and cpu is somethign wich may affect f.e. Zaurus users. much more then opteron-Guys. :)

          yeah, I took the original comment as something more 'leading' and not about wmii per-se. Don't want to see fvwm2 replaced with something like KDE, xfce4, Enlightenment or, god forbid, Gnome. :)

        2. By Anonymous Coward (128.171.90.200) on

          > So using less memory and cpu is somethign wich may affect f.e. Zaurus

          If it works flawlessly on my Zaurus, I'll certainly give it a try

          If it's more light weight than fvwm, I'll probably install it on my Sparc64 boxen as well, providing of course that it is not complete crap, but that goes without saying I guess.

      2. By Anonymous Coward (80.81.37.227) on

        > I have to say I think there is a good reason for the basic nature of the provided X environment.

        There is. Look at the licence. It's a shame that we have a non-free software in source tree even if there are truely free alternatives ready and available.

        Comments

        1. By Anonymous Coward (84.188.243.187) on

          > > I have to say I think there is a good reason for the basic nature of the provided X environment.
          >
          > There is. Look at the licence. It's a shame that we have a non-free software in source tree even if there are truely free alternatives ready and available.

          Totaly ack :)

        2. By tedu (71.139.183.72) on

          > > I have to say I think there is a good reason for the basic nature of the provided X environment.
          >
          > There is. Look at the licence. It's a shame that we have a non-free software in source tree even if there are truely free alternatives ready and available.

          what are you talking about?

      3. By Anonymous Coward (216.224.124.124) on

        > > .. it has occurred to me that the default desktop scheme in OpenBSD is starting to look a little long in the tooth.
        >
        > I have to say I think there is a good reason for the basic nature of the provided X environment.
        >
        > This install suits all machines and architectures running OpenBSD that you run X on. At the end of the day it means more to me that when you install OpenBSD on anything you get exactly the same environment with the same settings and that it is a sensible choice for the great range of hardware that OpenBSD supports (including the Zaurus). - Lets not go the way of the software vendors that obviously have shares in HW companies and make each successive version of the OS demand higher and higher spec machines by making the base installation more resource demanding.
        >

        Poison the evil little rat! http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison

    3. By Anonymous Coward (63.237.125.164) on

      mg is to vi as [x] is to fvwm

      Would be nice to see a change, yet...
      Trusted is the genius of OBSD devs.

  4. By Anonymous Coward (89.50.3.54) on

    Can I run KDE or GNOME apps with it?

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (84.188.231.42) on

      > Can I run KDE or GNOME apps with it?

      If gimp counts as GNOME-Application: YES
      I think just the depencies need to get installed (like kde-base or soemthign like it).

      Try and error.. :)

  5. By Anonymous Coward (128.171.90.200) on

    Out of interest does anyone know what the license on this is, I'm looking all over the site and coming up with nothing

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (80.81.37.227) on

      > Out of interest does anyone know what the license on this is, I'm looking all over the site and coming up with nothing

      It's MIT, as opposed to fvwm's GPL!

      Comments

      1. By Anonymous Coward (70.27.15.123) on

        > > Out of interest does anyone know what the license on this is, I'm looking all over the site and coming up with nothing
        >
        > It's MIT, as opposed to fvwm's GPL!

        Only the new fvwm releases are GPL. The one included with openbsd isn't.

      2. By tedu (71.139.183.72) on

        > > Out of interest does anyone know what the license on this is, I'm looking all over the site and coming up with nothing
        >
        > It's MIT, as opposed to fvwm's GPL!

        i think you mean "it's MIT as opposed to fvwm's MIT", but that doesn't make much sense. openbsd doesn't build the few modules that are GPL.

  6. By Matthias Kilian (84.134.44.144) on

    When playing around with wmii, my first thought was "way cool", especially because of the 9P interface and the way wmiimenu works. Unfortunately, there are two concepts I just can't live with.

    1. Column-based layout -- I'm used to have a browser spanning the whole screen width for my favorite web game, http://karopapier.beididi.de, one or two 80x24 xterms below it, and a 48 pixel bottom line containing several xloads and a clock, i.e. a row-based layout.

    2. Even if wmii would support row-based layout, this would also mean that xterms would change their width dynamically then and now, which is very disturbing (at least to me). There should be no life beyond the 80th character :-)

    So I'll watch out for future wmii releases but stick with ratpoison for now.

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (84.188.243.187) on

      > When playing around with wmii, my first thought was "way cool", especially because of the 9P interface and the way wmiimenu works. Unfortunately, there are two concepts I just can't live with.
      >
      > 1. Column-based layout -- I'm used to have a browser spanning the whole screen width for my favorite web game, http://karopapier.beididi.de, one or two 80x24 xterms below it, and a 48 pixel bottom line containing several xloads and a clock, i.e. a row-based layout.
      >
      > 2. Even if wmii would support row-based layout, this would also mean that xterms would change their width dynamically then and now, which is very disturbing (at least to me). There should be no life beyond the 80th character :-)
      >
      > So I'll watch out for future wmii releases but stick with ratpoison for now.
      >

      That wont change..
      Read the Website to know about the "workaround" (== working like any other WM).

    2. By Anonymous Coward (81.172.140.198) on

      >
      > So I'll watch out for future wmii releases but stick with ratpoison for now.

      Ion is really good for that type of usage too:
      http://modeemi.cs.tut.fi/~tuomov/ion/intro.html

  7. By Anonymous Coward (63.19.211.97) on

    I don't run any xwindows so perhaps improving window to where it is as good as screen would be good work. Also some direct frame buffer work for the graphic links browser so X11 is not needed and pictures can be viewed from ttys. ;)

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