Re: [dwm] dwm's future

On Sat, 25 Apr 2009 19:23:50 +0100
Anselm R Garbe <garbeam_AT_gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi there,
>
> I discussed several stuff on IRC recently but wanted to share my
> thoughts here.
>
> 1. One idea is getting rid of the dwm bar altogether and to print the
> dwm state to stdout when it changes, however after thinking carefully
> about it I conclude that having the bar build-in is definately a
> stayer. It's so much simpler than the hassle with an external bar, not
> worth it. So very unlikely.

Yes, please please keep the bar. I really like it and that it works out
of the box.

> 2. Another idea is to switch to another dependency for the rendering
> bit which could possibly be cairo. After all I'm nearly giving up the
> hope that X font handling will ever be fixed and work properly, so
> that relying on a pile of other crap seems to become a solution. cairo
> is a dependency for firefox and I guess that every dwm user uses
> firefox occasionally. And we might benefit from a little bit smoother
> looking dwm (same for dmenu of course and my ongoing st efforts). I
> think this idea is quite likely.

I have no problem with how dwm looks now (except for unicode
problems, but that is a font issue). I like the simpler more retro
look. Do you mean to use cairo for rendering fonts or also the dmenu
itself?

Personally I would like to have one dwm as is, and one gdwm (or some
better name) with more bells and whistles and dependencies. Or that
one can patch cairo support if one want it. For older computers/netbooks
(power saving) it is nice to still have a simple wm that is not
dependent on MSLOC of libraries. For modern computers it could be nice
with some better font handling I guess. I mean I have cairo installed
on all my computers, but I don't have the development packages, so if I
need that as well to compile dwm, then there will be a lot of extra
Mbs. For my worksstation that is fine, but for a netbook with limited
SSD...

For me the great selling point of dwm is that it makes me more
productive as I don't need to do any window moving/resizing etc...

> 3. A third idea for legacy support is, that I tend to add a
> compile-time option or a specific Rule extension that let's you set to
> reparent all clients or certain clients which are broken such as
> Mathematica or various Swing apps, though I'm not absolutely sure how
> likely that is. Somehow my inner feelings are against it, because it's
> not a dwm problem and those broken apps should be fixed.

Not a problem for me now, so I don't know if this is needed. For me it
is more important to have working patches to add pertag, bstack and
perhaps fibonaccio (will test this when I change to dwm on my
workstation).
Received on Mon Apr 27 2009 - 09:47:19 UTC