Re: [dwm] dwm's future

Hi all,
 I'm sure there is a severe risk of this piece being understood as
flamebait (this is not my intention).

 However, I strongly believe that the major problem of dwm currently is
not font handling (8bit ascii bitmap fonts are perfectly fine thank
you); not the status bar (it's great); instead, it's twofold:

1. Complete lack of proper xrandr and multi monitor support - this is
solved in multiple tiling wms, there's no reason other than lack of
interest or obscure ideology not to do this.

2. Handling of broken applications (reparenting). Not many tiling wms
get this right. I believe a good solution is to unconditionally reparent
all windows. This adds some code, but means no difference to the user
(the window "frame" can still be a single pixel border, if you like),
however it fixes all/most incompatibility problems in a single stroke.

NB. the added complexity of unconditional reparenting is massively
smaller than using pango (especially if you consider the dependencies);
the achieved improvement in perceived user experience is also arguably
much larger.

Regards,
 Mate
Received on Sun Apr 26 2009 - 15:01:21 UTC