on Thu, Apr 12, 2001 at 08:13:22AM +0800, csj (csj@mindgate.net) wrote:
> On Thursday 12 April 2001 07:44, Karsten M. Self wrote:
> > WindowMaker, my preference. Gratuitous screenshots at
> > http://kmself.home.netcom.com/Images/Desktop/ It's running very
> > happily on my PPro 180MHz/256MB system (at 96MB until November
> > 2000).
> >
> > Other good middlin' options include BlackBox, SawFish (formerly
> > SawMill). Purists often tend toward fvwm2.
>
> You missed my favorite icewm (in 3 flavors - -gnome -lite). The most
> Windows-like wm (not counting KDE's).
Legacy MS Windows is not necessarially the Gold Standard® of GUI shell
design.
> Which brings me to my favorite lite-wm peeve. Why do most of them
> lack a persistent menu/taskbar?
Which brings me to reason #17,317 I love WindowMaker. You want a
start bar? Raise a menu, click on the titlebar to make it persistant,
and scoot it to the bottom of the screen. With WPrefs configured to
scroll off-screen menus on-screen, you've now got a menu of your choice
-- the full root menu, a window list menu, a workspace menu, or any
particular submenu you prefer. I do this from time to time, though I
prefer life w/o such artifacts.
You also have various options for opening menus. By default,
right-mouse on root window is apps menu, middle mouse is window list.
These are bound to <F11> and <F12> as well.
If you want to launch a specific app, you can launch the "Run" dialog.
I have this bound to <alt><F2> (from the KDE keybinding).
I've also created the following hotkey assignments for applications:
- <alt><shift>-t: rxvt
- <alt><shift>-r: root sudo shell
- <alt><shift>-m: mutt
- <alt><shift>-w: w3m. Actually, I like this one a lot:
rxvt -title w3m -e screen w3m
- as well as miscellaneous navigation, widget manipulation, and other
keystrokes.
I've also modified my root menus from the Debian defaults to put some
useful applications at the top level of the menu. You can add in the
default Debian menu as a hook with the following entry in
GNUStep/Defaults/WMRootMenu:
("Debian menus", OPEN_MENU, "/etc/X11/WindowMaker/menu.hook"),
...providing the best of both worlds -- my own tailored menus, and the
automatically updated system menus -- in the same utility.
Incidentally, WPrefs is reason #15,835 for loving WindowMaker -- this is
one slick, well-thought out, and functional configuration utility.
There's little that I want configured which it doesn't provide for.
> Take Blackbox (a favorite from the posts I have read). To open a new
> app you have to click at the desktop (or is there some abstruse
> keyboard shortcut?) to bring up the app-ropriate menu The problem: how
> do you click at the desktop when you have a maximized app filling the
> screen? Ditto for WindowMaker (though I have found out there's a
> keyboard shortcut).
>
> Here's one problem the Windows folks have solved pretty well. A
> menu/taskbar that lets you launch apps and Amazon through them.
WindowMaker's done this fairly elegantly IMO. There are a number of
human-computer interface issues that the NeXT people worked through, and
which the WindowMaker team's realized were signifcant enough to work
into their product. This isn't just a visual knock-off of NeXT, it's
got some of the smarts there as well. While some of the flexibility and
flash of other WMs isn't present in WindowMaker, I've found it's a
balance of clean design and wonderful usability.
Cheers.
--
Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand? There is no K5 cabal
http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/ http://www.kuro5hin.org
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