Re: [gtk-list] Re: GTK window manager...

[Greg Badros <gjb cs washington edu>]

Havoc Pennington <rhp@zirx.pair.com> writes:

> Maybe the WM authors on the list can give you more details, but you aren't
> going to be able to write a window manager in Gtk. Lots of the Xlib stuff
> you need just isn't available, Gdk hides it all.
> 
> I would suggest: start with FVWM2, remove all cruft that duplicates Gnome
> functionality, add a little module that uses Gtk for dialogs and stuff.
> However, I think someone has already done this. At least, I remember a
> post about a hacked FVWM designed to be the "Gnome WM."
> 
> You might be less enthused about my second suggestion, but here it is
> anyway: work on Gnome integration for SCWM. It is already stripped down to
> a bare minimum of C code; everything is implemented in Scheme instead. It
> is Gnome compliant, and you can use guile-gtk to throw up dialogs and
> stuff in Gtk. It's well-documented too. But I'm sure it could use some
> work to create a minimal Scheme module that is user-friendly, uses
> guile-gtk for all dialogs and configuration, and generally interoperates
> well with Gnome. "Gnome mode" for scwm...

Scwm does do a lot with gtk, and it gains a lot of leverage from this
interaction.  We're always looking for new developers, Matt, and it
sounds like your goals mesh fairly well with ours... one of the things
we'd most like to do is move the extra C code off into dynamically
loadable modules, separated from the scwm core.  Thus, e.g., the menu
support that Scwm has could be dynamically loaded only if you used it--
you could instead choose to use only gtk menus, and never have to load
that code.

Although Scwm isn't really stripped down to the bare minimum of C code,
we are moving towards at least making the core exactly that.

My recommendation is that you start taking a look at Scwm, and see what
you can do with guile-gtk and then start helping us out in making it a
leaner wm.  We readily accept patches, and are new-developer friendly. See

http://vicarious-existence.mit.edu/scwm/

<snip>

Greg