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Having a separate window management service is perhaps the greatest blessing of X11. This is one area where X11 offers endless choice, with sometimes dramatic d
by bsdubernerd 6y ago
Having a separate window management service is perhaps the greatest blessing of X11. This is one area where X11 offers endless choice, with sometimes dramatic differences between each.
Experimenting with different window managers is something I started to do very early in my linux journey and identified as a clear win.
This is putting a very high bar for me to try anything "wayland", since I'm not particularly fond of sway, won't ever go back to dumbed-down window manager, useless client-side decorations, very questionable input management and lack of pervasive unredirection.
- generalizations 6y ago> With 'pure Elisp' I mean no FFI. Most Wayland compositors call low-level interfaces to manipulate graphics, but we can not implement such a compositor since those interfaces are largely absent in Elisp and the performance would be of a great concern. So I tend to make a subcompositor that runs on top of another compositor (mutter for example) to offloads most dirty work and only deals with window management. But even this simplified design can not be realized due to the inability of Elisp to send/receive file descriptors through a socket. It seems like in this case it's a limitation of elisp, not wayland.
- bsdubernerd 6y agoYou could argue that with emacs modules nowdays you can implement a full compositor by linking-in parts of wlroots if you really wanted to. My point is that you don't have to do any of that in X11 since window-management is implemented through a separate protocol and stand-alone process, which makes it much easier to implement.