5 ms·

The MGR Window System

64 points by floren 4y ago

teddyh 4y ago
Note: Article author has since moved to Wayland.
- ibotty 4y ago
  https://hack.org/mc/blog/no-more-x11.html https://hack.org/mc/blog/no-more-x11.html
marttt 4y ago
I wonder if this system got any inspiration from Plan 9? It looks really similar to 8½, Rob Pike's early window manager for Plan 9 [1]. Or even the Blit [2]. I would love to try out MGR on the Linux framebuffer, though. Edit: found an interesting 2016 HN thread on "oldschool" windowing systems that also mentions both MGR and 8½ [3]. 1: http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/812/8%C2%BD.fig1.png http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/812/8%C2%BD.f... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blit_(computer_terminal)#Window_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blit_(computer_terminal)#Windo... 3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11477565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11477565
- justin66 4y ago
  It predates Plan 9.
shrubble 4y ago
Stephen Uhler's home page, some papers about MGR are there, also... https://sau.homeip.net/ https://sau.homeip.net/
sbf501 4y ago
Of all the apps in the upper left, I still to this day use xload and xclock. Xeyes was always kind of pointless to me. And xbiff is meaningless in today's world of email saturation.
- kragen 4y ago
  Xeyes was occasionally useful for telling you when the machine it's running on has gone down or is too overloaded to be usable. In today's world of nested window systems it's also helpful for telling you if your mouse cursor movement is being delivered to a nested screen. Mostly, though, xeyes was "pointless" in the same sense that fine art is "pointless", like xneko, window manager themes, xshostakovich, or screensavers. It doesn't have a point; it is itself the point.
  - paulmooreparks 4y ago
    For me, xeyes can be useful on multiple high-DPI monitors where I occasionally lose the mouse.
  - sbf501 4y ago
    Huh. Today I learned about Xeyes. Thanks!
- teddyh 4y ago
  I still use xbiff.
mhd 4y ago
Another weird window system was the W system (not to be confused with the X predecessor). Mostly monochrome. https://eerott.mbnet.fi/historical/w1r2.html https://eerott.mbnet.fi/historical/w1r2.html
- the_only_law 4y ago
  It's been a while since I read up about it (and it's a tad hard to Google for), but I almost want to put some information about AlphaWindows to share. It was an odd windowing system. From my understanding theirs still a commerical implementation exists, though God knows who's paying for an obscure windowing system that only ran on select terminals. If I can find a supported terminal and some sort of spec (or possibly some level of reverse engineering, but I don't have the patience), I'd love to work on my own implementation. There was one HP 700 series terminal that might be easiest to get my hands on. There's a rather sparse Wikipedia page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaWindows https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaWindows
unixbane 4y ago
> If you want to compare MGR to the X Window System, you might consider the MGR server as something like a combination of an X server + window manager + xterm Sounds like a nightmare of in band signalling vulnerabilities. Edit: your downvote is invalid. you literally just did it because i wrote something negative about the topic of the thread. it's still true and a good point. this is similar to how youtube downvotes worked. i still upvoted the article because it was useful to me. i am rational you are not.
- kragen 4y ago
  I always wondered about this, but I never dug into MGR enough to find out if they defended against it. Maybe the multiplexers rmgr and mtx were perfectly secure, and restricted the programs they ran to only manipulating their own window (which X11 doesn't succeed at, or even attempt), but it seems like some kinds of compositions of programs might not play well with this. Also there were plenty of terminals that had escape-sequence vulnerabilities of the flavor "sending escape sequence X to the terminal will cause it to (immediately or later) send character sequence Y back to the host [which the host will interpret as a command]", like cross-site scripting. As I understand it, this kind of send-escape-sequence-X-to-bind-an-event-to-character-sequence-Y is exactly how MGR worked, and I wonder if it also had this vulnerability. This is usually, but not always, a matter of running one program after another; for example, write(1) (and I think wall(8) if enabled) would allow you to send arbitrary escape sequences to anybody's terminal at any time. Trusted path issues also seem like they could be a problem, though it's kind of a problem with Unix shells in terminals in general: when you hit ^Z to suspend a process and it drops you back to your shell, how do you know that it really suspended and that what you're typing to is really your shell? This could matter if you use "sudo". (It doesn't matter that much because by virtue of running the program in the first place you are giving all your authority to that program, unlike in capability-based systems.) You might want to remove your complaints about downvotes and boasts of rationality so people don't downvote you for them.
  - pabs3 4y ago
    X had various security extensions like XACE to restrict what clients can do. https://www.x.org/archive/X11R7.5/doc/security/XACE-Spec.html https://www.x.org/archive/X11R7.5/doc/security/XACE-Spec.htm...
imiric 4y ago
Very cool to learn about this bit of history. I really enjoy how crisp and legible fonts and graphics are in that screenshot. Even the tiny terminal in the upper left is very clear. Achieving that in X was always an exercise in frustration IME, involving some obscure fontconfig incantations and specific bitmap fonts. Ultimately I couldn't live without font hinting, but there's something so appealing about that crisp bitmap look.
- argulane 4y ago
  That font in the screen shot looks quite similar to Terminus Font[1]. If the bitmap version does not work then there is also a TTF version[2] of Terminus that works quite well. It's one of my all time favorite fonts[3]. [1]: http://terminus-font.sourceforge.net/ http://terminus-font.sourceforge.net/ [2]: https://files.ax86.net/terminus-ttf/ https://files.ax86.net/terminus-ttf/ [3]: https://i.imgur.com/46Qxtqa.png https://i.imgur.com/46Qxtqa.png
  - cpach 4y ago
    The font is called Gacha. https://hack.org/mc/fonts/ https://hack.org/mc/fonts/
  - thinkingcow 4y ago
    I created all of the original MGR bitmap fonts by hand - a pixel at a time. For much of its life MGR ran on monochrome (1 bit per pixel) bitmap displays, that tend to look more crisp than modern anti-aliased displays
jmclnx 4y ago
From reading the article, I think MGR was available for Coherent OS prior to its X implementation. I never used it myself but if I could go back....
floren 4y ago
I'm fascinated by the note about older versions MGR working on the Macintosh. I may have to poke at the TUHS mailing list to see if anyone knows more.
lotw_dot_site 4y ago
This is true motivation to keep me working out the ideal desktop environment for Linux on the Web. The idea of "a message passing facility enabling client programs to rendezvous and exchange messages" is in particular the kind of thing I want to continue to iterate upon, albeit in a more abstract sense than the kinds of windowing events that are referred to. https://lotw.site/desk https://lotw.site/desk
ggm 4y ago
I used it in 1985/6 at UCL-CS on a sun workstation, and it was lovely. The port to sunos had some issues. Mike Lesk from Bell labs was in residence and had brought it with him on a tape. (Mike invented UUCP) The thing is, the labs people hated time wasters (like me) They used a simple test as an entry key to investing in helping you: if you claimed to be a programmer and said there was a problem they waited for you to proffer patches..
- pdmccormick 4y ago
  In the mid 2000s, the wireless network infrastructure at my university authenticated your device based on SSH'ing into a server. But the specific SSH server used at that time did not support password-less logins via keys, so it required typing in a password every time you connected (and WiFi was flakey in that environment in those days, so dropped connections weren't uncommon). I asked the IT support folks about this, and they told me that I should try adding it to the software. I figured out what it would take and wrote some patches, but then they said they couldn't run something customized like that. Years on their reasoning makes sense, but at the time it was really disappointing and I dropped the effort after that.
  - ggm 4y ago
    I think this happens far more often than people realise. Part of the problem is ownership: It's so easy to become proprietorial about code. But another part is that people ideate solutions very differently and "style" is big in code. The gap between XEmacs and Emacs is noted in the xemacs website in all it's painful glory. It's got politics, it's got lawyers, but it's also got code style and complexity. I did a package for homebrew via git and PR, and the CI cost to make it "fit" their expectations was a multi-day iterative nightmare. I can see how it would be a barrier to entry for a lot of people. The other side, I have managed to get one-line fixes into the hands of competent coders. There are times they will simply accept it, apply it, and move on. Early in my career (1984) I accepted community patches for a body of code I was employed to maintain and imperilled it's IPR. It was a big deal at the time. I didn't think patches to C being used by the community was going to wind up there. I was pretty sure the patch submitters didn't mean to go there either (by stealth I mean, they would have been delighted if the entire body of code was in the public domain) -This was when we swapped code by 1200bpi tape reels in the post. I think "too risky to accept community patches" is an excuse rather than a real reason. They just didn't want the paperwork and hassle to adopt the code. But the negative effect I can totally believe. I would have been very de-motivated by this.

64 points by floren 4y ago

teddyh 4y ago

Note: Article author has since moved to Wayland.

ibotty 4y ago
https://hack.org/mc/blog/no-more-x11.html https://hack.org/mc/blog/no-more-x11.html

marttt 4y ago

I wonder if this system got any inspiration from Plan 9? It looks really similar to 8½, Rob Pike's early window manager for Plan 9 [1]. Or even the Blit [2]. I would love to try out MGR on the Linux framebuffer, though. Edit: found an interesting 2016 HN thread on "oldschool" windowing systems that also mentions both MGR and 8½ [3]. 1: http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/812/8%C2%BD.fig1.png http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/812/8%C2%BD.f... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blit_(computer_terminal)#Window_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blit_(computer_terminal)#Windo... 3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11477565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11477565

justin66 4y ago
It predates Plan 9.

shrubble 4y ago

Stephen Uhler's home page, some papers about MGR are there, also... https://sau.homeip.net/ https://sau.homeip.net/

sbf501 4y ago

Of all the apps in the upper left, I still to this day use xload and xclock. Xeyes was always kind of pointless to me. And xbiff is meaningless in today's world of email saturation.

kragen 4y ago
Xeyes was occasionally useful for telling you when the machine it's running on has gone down or is too overloaded to be usable. In today's world of nested window systems it's also helpful for telling you if your mouse cursor movement is being delivered to a nested screen. Mostly, though, xeyes was "pointless" in the same sense that fine art is "pointless", like xneko, window manager themes, xshostakovich, or screensavers. It doesn't have a point; it is itself the point.
- paulmooreparks 4y ago
  For me, xeyes can be useful on multiple high-DPI monitors where I occasionally lose the mouse.
- sbf501 4y ago
  Huh. Today I learned about Xeyes. Thanks!
teddyh 4y ago
I still use xbiff.

mhd 4y ago

Another weird window system was the W system (not to be confused with the X predecessor). Mostly monochrome. https://eerott.mbnet.fi/historical/w1r2.html https://eerott.mbnet.fi/historical/w1r2.html

the_only_law 4y ago
It's been a while since I read up about it (and it's a tad hard to Google for), but I almost want to put some information about AlphaWindows to share. It was an odd windowing system. From my understanding theirs still a commerical implementation exists, though God knows who's paying for an obscure windowing system that only ran on select terminals. If I can find a supported terminal and some sort of spec (or possibly some level of reverse engineering, but I don't have the patience), I'd love to work on my own implementation. There was one HP 700 series terminal that might be easiest to get my hands on. There's a rather sparse Wikipedia page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaWindows https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaWindows

unixbane 4y ago

> If you want to compare MGR to the X Window System, you might consider the MGR server as something like a combination of an X server + window manager + xterm Sounds like a nightmare of in band signalling vulnerabilities. Edit: your downvote is invalid. you literally just did it because i wrote something negative about the topic of the thread. it's still true and a good point. this is similar to how youtube downvotes worked. i still upvoted the article because it was useful to me. i am rational you are not.

kragen 4y ago
I always wondered about this, but I never dug into MGR enough to find out if they defended against it. Maybe the multiplexers rmgr and mtx were perfectly secure, and restricted the programs they ran to only manipulating their own window (which X11 doesn't succeed at, or even attempt), but it seems like some kinds of compositions of programs might not play well with this. Also there were plenty of terminals that had escape-sequence vulnerabilities of the flavor "sending escape sequence X to the terminal will cause it to (immediately or later) send character sequence Y back to the host [which the host will interpret as a command]", like cross-site scripting. As I understand it, this kind of send-escape-sequence-X-to-bind-an-event-to-character-sequence-Y is exactly how MGR worked, and I wonder if it also had this vulnerability. This is usually, but not always, a matter of running one program after another; for example, write(1) (and I think wall(8) if enabled) would allow you to send arbitrary escape sequences to anybody's terminal at any time. Trusted path issues also seem like they could be a problem, though it's kind of a problem with Unix shells in terminals in general: when you hit ^Z to suspend a process and it drops you back to your shell, how do you know that it really suspended and that what you're typing to is really your shell? This could matter if you use "sudo". (It doesn't matter that much because by virtue of running the program in the first place you are giving all your authority to that program, unlike in capability-based systems.) You might want to remove your complaints about downvotes and boasts of rationality so people don't downvote you for them.
- pabs3 4y ago
  X had various security extensions like XACE to restrict what clients can do. https://www.x.org/archive/X11R7.5/doc/security/XACE-Spec.html https://www.x.org/archive/X11R7.5/doc/security/XACE-Spec.htm...

imiric 4y ago

Very cool to learn about this bit of history. I really enjoy how crisp and legible fonts and graphics are in that screenshot. Even the tiny terminal in the upper left is very clear. Achieving that in X was always an exercise in frustration IME, involving some obscure fontconfig incantations and specific bitmap fonts. Ultimately I couldn't live without font hinting, but there's something so appealing about that crisp bitmap look.

argulane 4y ago
That font in the screen shot looks quite similar to Terminus Font[1]. If the bitmap version does not work then there is also a TTF version[2] of Terminus that works quite well. It's one of my all time favorite fonts[3]. [1]: http://terminus-font.sourceforge.net/ http://terminus-font.sourceforge.net/ [2]: https://files.ax86.net/terminus-ttf/ https://files.ax86.net/terminus-ttf/ [3]: https://i.imgur.com/46Qxtqa.png https://i.imgur.com/46Qxtqa.png
- cpach 4y ago
  The font is called Gacha. https://hack.org/mc/fonts/ https://hack.org/mc/fonts/
- thinkingcow 4y ago
  I created all of the original MGR bitmap fonts by hand - a pixel at a time. For much of its life MGR ran on monochrome (1 bit per pixel) bitmap displays, that tend to look more crisp than modern anti-aliased displays

jmclnx 4y ago

From reading the article, I think MGR was available for Coherent OS prior to its X implementation. I never used it myself but if I could go back....

floren 4y ago

I'm fascinated by the note about older versions MGR working on the Macintosh. I may have to poke at the TUHS mailing list to see if anyone knows more.

lotw_dot_site 4y ago

This is true motivation to keep me working out the ideal desktop environment for Linux on the Web. The idea of "a message passing facility enabling client programs to rendezvous and exchange messages" is in particular the kind of thing I want to continue to iterate upon, albeit in a more abstract sense than the kinds of windowing events that are referred to. https://lotw.site/desk https://lotw.site/desk

ggm 4y ago

I used it in 1985/6 at UCL-CS on a sun workstation, and it was lovely. The port to sunos had some issues. Mike Lesk from Bell labs was in residence and had brought it with him on a tape. (Mike invented UUCP) The thing is, the labs people hated time wasters (like me) They used a simple test as an entry key to investing in helping you: if you claimed to be a programmer and said there was a problem they waited for you to proffer patches..

pdmccormick 4y ago
In the mid 2000s, the wireless network infrastructure at my university authenticated your device based on SSH'ing into a server. But the specific SSH server used at that time did not support password-less logins via keys, so it required typing in a password every time you connected (and WiFi was flakey in that environment in those days, so dropped connections weren't uncommon). I asked the IT support folks about this, and they told me that I should try adding it to the software. I figured out what it would take and wrote some patches, but then they said they couldn't run something customized like that. Years on their reasoning makes sense, but at the time it was really disappointing and I dropped the effort after that.
- ggm 4y ago
  I think this happens far more often than people realise. Part of the problem is ownership: It's so easy to become proprietorial about code. But another part is that people ideate solutions very differently and "style" is big in code. The gap between XEmacs and Emacs is noted in the xemacs website in all it's painful glory. It's got politics, it's got lawyers, but it's also got code style and complexity. I did a package for homebrew via git and PR, and the CI cost to make it "fit" their expectations was a multi-day iterative nightmare. I can see how it would be a barrier to entry for a lot of people. The other side, I have managed to get one-line fixes into the hands of competent coders. There are times they will simply accept it, apply it, and move on. Early in my career (1984) I accepted community patches for a body of code I was employed to maintain and imperilled it's IPR. It was a big deal at the time. I didn't think patches to C being used by the community was going to wind up there. I was pretty sure the patch submitters didn't mean to go there either (by stealth I mean, they would have been delighted if the entire body of code was in the public domain) -This was when we swapped code by 1200bpi tape reels in the post. I think "too risky to accept community patches" is an excuse rather than a real reason. They just didn't want the paperwork and hassle to adopt the code. But the negative effect I can totally believe. I would have been very de-motivated by this.