Thursday, January 21, 2010

Of Window Managers…

I have always been a nomad, going from window manager to window manager, across systems and networks, from the classics, such as twm, fvwm, mwm, to more modern and contemporary WMs such as Enlightenment, KWin, Metacity, IceWM, Fluxbox, BlackBox, Openbox, AfterStep, Ion (and Ion 2 and Ion 3), etc., and I have not found a WM that works quite like what I want without all the extras that I didn’t.

Until matwm.

I know this Belgian guy names Mattis that wrote a window manager named matwm. Originally, it was a fork of evilwm/yeahwm, but that didn’t last. Only one release was ever made, matwm-0.0.1. Enter matwm2. A from-scratch, brand new window manger that is EWMH-compatible and ICCCM-compatible.

For several months now, Mattis has been working hard now, refining matwm2 to a wonderful state. Only recently has he declared a 0.1, after almost 100 0.0.x releases, and even the 0.1 prereleases feel like a stable 1.0 release!

UPDATE! Screw what I said about prereleases, 0.1.0 stable has been cut out, and you can get the code from http://www.squidjam.com/matwm/.

It is known to work on the following OSes, and should work on far earlier releases than tested:

Linux 2.4 / glibc 2.3 or later on x86

Linux 2.6.27 / glibc 2.8 on PowerPC

FreeBSD 6.2 and later

NetBSD 5.0 and later

OpenBSD 3.6 and later

Microsoft Windows Subsystem for Unix-based Application version 5.2, 6.0, and later. Should work on earlier Interix 3.5. Unsure about 3.0 and earlier.

Minix 3.1.3

Solaris 10 (from the Solaris Express Developer Edition 09/07 DVD)

Since I took too much of your time with useless details above, here’s a video of a fat boy running into a fence and knocking it down:

1 comment:

mat said...

unlike stated above the prereleases were horrible (pre1 and 2 don't even work on linux), but after many days of work i have released 0.1.0, you can grab it at http://www.squidjam.com/matwm/pub/matwm2-0.1.0.tar.gz and more information + future releases can be found at http://www.squidjam.com/matwm