9 ms·
Window Maker: X11 window manager with the look and feel of the NeXTSTEP UI
- vvendigo 2y agoI am using it for twenty years now. With disabled dock it's a minimalism at its best. Looking at comments, I should give i3 a try.
- itomato 2y agoI agree, especially with Maximus and other tweaks. I will take our weird defaultsdb implementation over some of the alternatives that get pitched. Scheme? No thanks..
- JNRowe 2y agoRelated: There is an in-development Wayland compositor for the Window Maker look and feel called wlmaker¹. It is already quite usable, but is very barebones right now. ¹ https://github.com/phkaeser/wlmaker https://github.com/phkaeser/wlmaker
- lagniappe 2y agoX11 did nothing wrong. You hear me? Nothing.
- speed_spread 2y agoIt's true except no one wants to maintain it anymore because the code is a mess. This is how software dies.
- immibis 2y agoYou're confusing X11 with Xorg. There were X servers before Xorg and there will be X servers after. (Xwayland is one!)
- talldayo 2y agox11 doesn't do much of anything to begin with, these days. It will still exist for the people that want to use it, but distros are right to not default to it anymore.
- bee_rider 2y agoDid they ever fix the accessibility situation on Wayland? Non-accessible defaults are not great IMO.
- spookie 2y agoThe issue is still open for GNOME, so I would assume it still is very much a problem: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/9 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/9
- johnny22 2y agognome and cosmic are both using accesskit for some of the parts that aren't completed yet.
- indrora 2y agoX11 did a lot of things. None of them "wrong", just "badly conjoined at the spinal cord". An X server is a fantastic example of how building drivers for deep hardware components should never have been written in userspace. (If anyone wants: There's a fantastic talk at LCA a few years ago from Keith Packard about X's history: https://youtu.be/cj02_UeUnGQ https://youtu.be/cj02_UeUnGQ )
- immibis 2y agoX11's architecture, on the other hand, is arguably better than Wayland's. Server-side rendering is a great way to It also has lots of flaws. "Mechanism, not policy" has to go, because you are trying to make a desktop environment, not draw arbitrary rectangles to the screen. It is already a given that there is one special client called the window manager; it would serve the architecture well to know that's the window manager instead of treating every client as if it could potentially be a window manager. But Wayland goes even further in this direction, eschewing things like icons, title bars and resize borders, which are basic expectations of a desktop environment. While X11's way of doing these things is esoteric, at least it has one. (If it were up to me, standardized window properties would be promoted to requests, so you'd just call xcb_set_window_title instead of fussing with atoms and window properties). Another anecdote is HDR: Wayland seems to still have not standardized how it should work; meanwhile on X11, there is already protocol support for multiple pixel formats (1-bit, 4-bit, 8-bit, 16-bit, 24-bit displays) and you could just add 48-bit color to that list. That would be one of the things Wayland stripped out while striving for simplicity (since everyone had 24-bit colour at the time) that turned out to actually be important. --- At some time before the heat death of the universe, I will get around to trying to fork Xorg and remove all the cruft and see where that goes. (Server-side rendering is not cruft. User-mode SVGA drivers are.) I did minimal work on this already - as in, I downloaded Xorg's source code and had a look through. The whole configuration system has to go. The XFree86 driver code and driver abstraction has to go, and the DRM driver hard-wired in place. Using dlsym to locate compiled-in modules makes tracking dependencies impossible. I suspect this has something to do with the state of Xorg: Nobody knows what it should and shouldn't do, and the module API for Xorg is the entirety of Xorg, so changing anything is liable to break someone's external module that wasn't on the "it should do this" list. It wouldn't be the first time the X server was forked with the intention of cleaning it up: Xorg is a fork of XFree86, which was a fork of X386, which was based on something I don't remember.
- barryrandall 2y agoThe problem is what X11 didn't do: attract and retain maintainers.
- hulitu 2y agoThe majority of SW developers want to make shiny new things, not fix old bugs.
- 0xbadcafebee 2y agoIt did have some of the worst code in open source. We didn't need to abandon the protocol, ABI & backwards compatibility (fuck Wayland sideways a broom) but a rewrite was sorely needed
- DonHopkins 2y agoWrong. https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398ebd47 https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398...
- l72 2y agoWhy can't we have a wayland server that can run different window managers like X did? That way, we only need one wayland compositor, and everyone can just write their own window managers.
- johnny22 2y agoMir is perhaps the closest thing to that ideal that I'm aware of. Maybe arcan, but I don't know anything about the architecture
- aidenn0 2y agoTIL that Mir is not dead, but pivoted to be built on top of Wayland.
- nine_k 2y agoThis looks doable. Create a Wayland compositor that does not do visible window management itself, but exposes an API to help relatively easily port and run an ICCCM-compliant WM. This looks so obvious that it ought to have been tried.
- wongogue 2y agoThat’s what wlroots is (almost). Many wayland window managers use that to offload wayland stuff.
- jmclnx 2y agoA big thanks to phkaeser for this work. If I am ever forced to use Wayland (yes forced), I could very well seem my self using Compositor. Great work!
- itomato 2y agoI just skimmed but it looks like it’s missing something like WiNGs
- asveikau 2y agoIf gnustep has a Wayland backend that would be a logical pairing. I seem to recall WindowMaker had special support for gnustep's NeXT style detachable menus.
- rgreekguy 2y agoIt's the first, and hopefully the only, time I will say I'm glad I see something on Wayland. I had some nasty visual issues once with WindowMaker, I feel like such a fundamental move is needed.
- neilv 2y agoNice to see they're still doing updates to WindowMaker ("https://www.windowmaker.org/news/ https://www.windowmaker.org/news/"). I last used it 25 years ago, but always liked it, and wouldn't have minded having an entire desktop that started with NextStep design. (Lately, I use XMonad or i3wm on workstations that I use heavily. On systems that I use only rarely, I use the default Debian desktop, which currently is more Gnome-opinionated than I think is ideal for new user ramp-up, but it's stock.)
- v1ne 2y agoWhat a blast from the past. WindowMaker served me well for many years, mainly on small screens. But once I started using multi-monitor setups, I switched to i3. One thing: WindowMaker is easy to use yet full of options to customize the appearance and behaviour of windows, per-application and per-window. Yet I think its killer feature for many years was the huge (64x64 pixel) "dock apps". There, you could put widgets with a ton of nice functionality, such as WiFi status, mailbox, disk monitoring — or just a clock. I don't remember if NeXTStep/WM were the first to offer those widgets, but I remember being a fond user of them.
- bestham 2y agoThe wharf? Suddenly that name made sense when linking about the heritage and the dock. TIL I guess.
- Agingcoder 2y agoYep. I used windowmaker then enlightenment ( I fell prey to shiny baubles ) then kde3 ( yes, in my mind still the single best desktop environment I’ve ever used ), and now i3. I love i3.
- aryonoco 2y agoKDE3 will always be the pinnacle of Desktop Linux for me as well. The functionality that was there at the time is astounding. Kmail was better than Evolution (minus the Exchange support), KOffice was half decent and a lot more performant than OpenOffice. KDevelop was a quite progressive IDE. Heck even Konqueror was a decent browser, with an engine that was so well designed and portable, that when Apple decided to make a browser, they forked KHTML. Everything was cohesive, used a unified design language, worked great on a system with 1GB of RAM. I don't understand how all these years later, on systems infinitely more powerful, desktop Linux is yet to get to a similar state. KDE4 was such a disaster, I left KDE and have never really gone back since.
- notpushkin 2y agoIf you feel ever nostalgic, there's Trinity! https://www.trinitydesktop.org/ https://www.trinitydesktop.org/
- whalesalad 2y agoTaking me back to when I first installed Linux back in 2001.
- rcarmo 2y agoStill one of my faves, only edged out by tweaking XFCE to look like Mac OS Platinum: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/04/12/2330 https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/04/12/2330 (I love collapsing windows for some reason).
- toddmorey 2y agoWindow shade was a brilliant feature!
- guerrilla 2y agoI wish somone could do this with contenporary GNOME. It's a be a good fit.
- rcarmo 2y agoThere was an extension for that someplace, but I forget where.
- asveikau 2y agoThat looks cool, but I don't see any config files shared.
- rcarmo 2y agoIt’s a publicly available theme.
- meepmorp 2y agoI miss dock apps.
- setopt 2y agoAren’t the panel widgets in e.g. KDE the same concept?
- fullstop 2y agoSort of, but dock apps all had to fit within a 64x64 pixel square. There was something nice about the constraint and how clever people were about fitting information within that square.
- badsectoracula 2y agoNote that while 64x64 is the default, it is not the only size - you can configure the dock to use "icons" (dock/window/etc blocks) of sizes from 24x24 up to 240x240. Though in practice most dockapps are limited at 64x64 (there have been some in recent years updated to allow other sizes from people who want to use Window Maker in HiDPI monitors) and using a different size has them centered (it might be possible to use the X11 composition extension to scale them in the future though, Window Maker already uses it to make previews for "miniaturized" -aka minimized- windows).
- abbbi 2y agoused it for years, .. then switched to i3. Never looked back :)
- cmgbhm 2y agoHa! Long time since I’ve seen that. That was the first open source project I got involved in and wrote the FAQ off irc and mailing list questions.
- lucasoshiro 2y agoI remember that years go (probably 2014) I was in one of the biggest retail stores in Brazil and I saw a different looking operating system in the salesmen computers. Years later I found that it was probably a Linux running Window Maker. It was surprising to see such a niche desktop environment being largely used by non-technical users
- toddmorey 2y agoIf I remember right, Best Buy used to run NextStep
- marcodiego 2y agoCasas Bahia. I think they still use it to this day. Their IT must be made of heros.
- pndy 2y agoThat brings me Etoile from memory: http://etoileos.com/etoile/ http://etoileos.com/etoile/ - it's like a mix of NeXTSTEP/GNUstep with Apple's Aqua. Sadly the project is pretty much dead - github shows last changes done 8, 10 and 11 years ago.
- mulderc 2y agoI was very interested in seeing where Etoile might go as it looked fantastic to me. Right now the most interesting thing I have seen in this space is helloSystem.
- pipeline_peak 2y agoI feel like the premise of helloSystem is the simple fact that macOS uses parts on FreeBSD therefore they decided to dress up FreeBSD to look more like macOS lol. To me that’s not some meaningful that solves a fundamental problem. GNUSTEP is meaningful because it actually attempts to reimplement Cocoa. Because of that, I found Etoile more interesting than helloSystem because in turn it attempted to make GNUSTEP presentable to the non tech world in a way WindowMaker never will. I can understand helloSystem choice to ignore GNUSTEP given the GNUSTEP community is small and virtually inactive but again, it’s just another ooh aah shiny project that won’t get off the ground ever. If I were them I’d just port one of the many macOS looking desktop environments like whatever ElementsryOS or PopOS uses to FreeBSD and build from there. That’s obviously more productive, but productivity can be boring because it’s real and not a hobby project. :P
- jwells89 2y ago> If I were them I’d just port one of the many macOS looking desktop environments like whatever ElementsryOS or PopOS uses to FreeBSD and build from there. That’s obviously more productive, but productivity can be boring because it’s real and not a hobby project. :P I’m not sure how much productive it’d be in the long run, at least if faithfully replicating macOS is the goal. PopOS is bailing on GNOME (what it had been using) in favor of a bespoke DE because modifying GNOME had become too much of a pain, even for their relatively modest changes. Pantheon (elementary’s DE) closely resembles GNOME for likely similar reasons. Not that any of the other DEs would serve as better bases, unfortunately. No matter what making a Mac-style DE is going to be a steep uphill climb.
- BoingBoomTschak 2y agoReally has that retro-cool look down pat, a bit like CDE. My journey was Openbox -> i3 -> bspwm, but I always wanted to try it just for the aesthetics.
- Findecanor 2y agoI've been using it since it came out. Before that, I used a NextStep theme for FVWM. I'm dependent on WindowShade and wouldn't want to use a window manager without it. I have the Window List menu pinned below the dock on the right side of the screen, from where it can pop out to full width if the mouse pointer touches the screen edge. I much prefer that over a "task bar" that doesn't show full titles but takes up a lot of space. (and no, I don't use other icons intended for the purpose) I used to have my own patch with a few graphical tweaks but stopped compiling from source a long time ago.
- cyberpunk 2y agoGot any any screenshots? I’m having a hard time imagining this..
- sumtechguy 2y agofvwm was extremely flexible and skinable but you had to really dig around in its config files to make it do it.
- tangus 2y agoThe WindowMaker screenshots page has one just like they described: http://www.windowmaker.org/screenshots/lumpi-wmaker.png http://www.windowmaker.org/screenshots/lumpi-wmaker.png
- BaculumMeumEst 2y agoDude I need this for MacOS 8. God I would pay so much money for a replica iMac with MacOS 8.
- hakfoo 2y agomlvwm? https://github.com/morgant/mlvwm https://github.com/morgant/mlvwm I accept all major currencies.
- 0points 2y agodoge?
- BaculumMeumEst 2y agoDuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuude.
- calmbonsai 2y agoHappy memories! I switched to i3, but man...yeah those were the days. I even built my workstation at the time to mimic the black-cube look of a NeXTcube.
- api 2y agoI ran this way back in probably the late 1990s in my college dorm!
- karmakaze 2y agoI tried Window Maker because I liked the aesthetics of NeXTSTEP when I'd used it. On Linux though, I just couldn't get used to the left-side scrollbars. It was ok on NeXTSTEP because that's how that always was, but seeing my Linux like that was one STEP too far.
- jwr 2y agoUsed it for many years on various machines, good stuff!
- lholden 2y agoI used this for a couple years many many years ago. I even made several dock widgets for it for various purposes. The source code for these widgets even helped me get my first programming job! Good memories!
- gnuvince 2y agoBack in 1998-1999, I was interested in installing and using Linux in large part because I thought that the screenshots of Window Maker that I saw online were so damn pretty. When I finally got to use it, I liked how "solid" it felt; the menus were big and large, they stuck to the screen even if you moved your mouse off of them, etc. I don't use Window Maker anymore, but it'll forever hold a special place in my heart.
- Wowfunhappy 2y agoWhy did you stop using it?
- kuschkufan 2y agoI can tell you why I did back then. I saw screenshots of openbox/blackbox/fluxbox and wanted that instead.
- gnuvince 2y agoI went to Blackbox because its UI elements were smaller (title bars are more narrow, no 64x64 dock icons) which gave me more real estate on my 1024x768 monitor. I then migrated to Openbox because that had more active development at the time. This year, I've switched to herbstluftwm, a tiling window manager that's really nice and works in a way that agrees with me.
- hnlmorg 2y agoI never liked Window Maker much. Maybe I’m in the minority, but I tried a lot of Window Managers and desktop environments and usually ended up back on either K Desktop Environment or Sawfish. Obviously everyone’s heard of KDE but I don’t see many people talking about Sawfish. I never really liked GNOME much either; even when everyone was running it in the 2.x days. Enlightenment was (and still is) cool though and in my opinion never got enough credit. BeOS aesthetics (and the OS as a whole) will always have a special place in my heart too. Ultimately this all just boils down to personal preference. I’m definitely not suggesting that you’re wrong nor weird for liking Window Maker (if anything, I’m probably the weird one…)
- chrsw 2y agoToo bad GNUstep never got popular
- squarefoot 2y agoI kept it for a few years as my favorite WM, paired with Rox Filer with its panel switched off, that is, exclusively as a (very fast) file manager. WMaker turned out really useful when over 20 years back I had to set up lots of PCs for remote points of sale operations. Users should be able to do nothing beyond the strict necessary: send-receive mail, go to company's site, schedule remote management, print receipts, etc. No games or other distractions, no downloads, no customizable menus etc. Certainly not rocket science, but users would have very little computer experience, certainly none with Linux, therefore arranging user-proof kiosk-like desktops became mandatory or we would have been overwhelmed by complaints. WMaker did its job brilliantly, I put icons on the dock for all basic operations plus some safeguards to avoid deleting them and opening dangerous menus, and for what I know it still worked great when I left the company one year later. Good memories.
- icedchai 2y agoI ran this on my Sparc 10 for a few years (late 90's, early 2000's.)
- wmlive 2y agoPersonally, i'd wish Window Maker wouldn't fall for pointless feature creep (in-built screenshot feature!?) and would instead replace WINGs with the GNUstep framework. GNUstep has silently matured over the years but still lacks a real native window manager. Window Maker once aimed to be that but unfortunately didn't ever manage to fully integrate with GNUstep. Fully porting Window Maker to GNUstep would be a Win-Win situation for all involved parties: GNUstep already features Wayland support and also offers a theming capabality for which WINGs' hardcoded and thus unchangeable NeXTSTEP aestetics are no match. So replacing WINGs with the GNUstep framework would instantly provide Wayland and more advanced theming support, for free. People interested in an integrated Window Maker centric system based on Debian/Bookworm should have a look at https://wmlive.sourceforge.net https://wmlive.sourceforge.net and https://sourceforge.net/projects/wmlive/files/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/wmlive/files/ for downloads.
- ndegruchy 2y agoInteresting! I used to use WM as a desktop, and while it wasn't bloated feeling, it did feel like there were rough edges. GNUStep looked interesting, but I guess I never gave it much thought, or hit a roadblock with it. If both are really two sides to the same coin, it would be nice if they merged. I obviously don't have the full details, though.
- andsoitis 2y agoConcur. On the other hand, I had high hopes for Etoile, which had the goal of being a modern GNUstep-based user environment: http://etoileos.com/etoile/ http://etoileos.com/etoile/
- aninteger 2y agoThis is mentioned in the WINGs documentation here: https://www.windowmaker.org/docs/wings.html https://www.windowmaker.org/docs/wings.html Also I was under the impression that GNUstep's Wayland support was experimental at best. I believe it's very incomplete, at least that's what the readme says: https://github.com/gnustep/libs-back/tree/master/Source/wayland https://github.com/gnustep/libs-back/tree/master/Source/wayl...
- accrual 2y agoIf you like the aesthetic of this window manager, you may also like NsCDE: https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE I've personally used it on old 1.3 GHz P-III system running Debian 10, it's remarkably fast and usable even on such old hardware.
- shrubble 2y agoAlso: https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace for various versions of Linux: "NEXTSPACE is a desktop environment that brings a NeXTSTEP look and feel to Linux. I try to keep the user experience as close as possible to the original NeXT OS. It is developed according to the "OpenStep User Interface Guidelines"."
- felixding 2y agoI have been following the project for some years, and I wish the project success.
- baithree 2y agoWM-Live is built-off of the Debian/Bookworm 12.1 ISO. Reminds me of the Open BSD team's incremental modification of proprietary ATT code. Will dd 0.96 onto an optical drive soon.
- AceJohnny2 2y agoUnlike many here, I never grokked or really liked WindowMaker. The biggest thing was how the dock icons were occupying too much precious screen space, and were distracting. Especially in the Olden Days when monitor ratios were 4:3. In contrast with a 16:9 or 16:10 modern monitor, where you can put things on the side and they'll be more out of focus. Animated/informational dock icons, to show system stats or whatever, were more of a distraction than were worth it, and if you reduced the size of the dock icon then they became worthless. Couldn't have it both ways. I did not like how big a dock icon was when you minimized a window. This was long after Windows 95 showed a thinner taskbar was perfectly sufficient. I did not like the context menus that stuck around. Muscle memory, perhaps, but again: a distraction. I did love its columnar file/tree navigator, which macOS continues to provide in Finder, although it's not a default! All in all, it felt like an interesting exploration of the computer desktop UX space, but a dead end.
- dredmorbius 2y agoThe dock(s) and clip can be autohidden, expanding when hovered over. I've found this a useful compromise. (MacOS's dock can be configured ... somewhat ... similarly.)
- AceJohnny2 2y agoIndeed, I always configure the macOS dock to auto-hide. (I do not understand the people who don't and also leave it at the bottom of the screen rather than on the side. All that screen real-estate, wasted!)
- dredmorbius 2y agoThere are dozens of us side-hides! Dozens!
- cout 2y agoI remember trying both WindowMaker and AfterStep on RedHat 4.2 (or maybe 5.0). I picked AfterStep because it handled 256-color mode better. It wasn't long after that I had a card that could do 16-bit color and left AfterStep behind. Still I have a fond respect for those window managers, trying to build a desktop environment that was outside the box for the time.
- 0xbadcafebee 2y agoI used to use Window Maker all the time on Slackware. It was wicked fast, barebones, reliable, configurable. I just noticed it's packaged for Alpine (my current distro), I'll have to revisit it
- yellowapple 2y agoI miss the abundance of dock apps. It'd be neat if those could make a comeback.
- spentrent 2y agoMissing AfterStep from back in the day.
- xenospn 2y agoI used it for years on FreeBSD and hacked around its many parts. So much nostalgia!
- noufalibrahim 2y agoThis is nostalgic. I think I used to use sawfish/sawmill in those days. These days, I just use i3. Nothing extra.
- m_st 2y agoUsed that for years on my Gentoo installation back when I had more time to spend on my home computer. Can't recommend it enough.
- yashasolutions 2y agoThat's a name i haven't heard in a long time... Window Maker was my first desktop interface when I started Linux. Though I can see in 20 years not much seems to have change, it is good to see it is not dead. It is quite a unique style.
- liendolucas 2y agoFond memories, using it extensively during my early years with Linux. I do still like very much the neat look and feel of the NeXTSTEP UI. A couple of months ago I attempted to develop a small example using the SDK and it was an extremely dissapointing experience. Not related to Objective-C per se, but the way you are supposed to develop GUI apps (GORM: is surprisingly convoluted and confusing to use it). That combined with the fact that documentation is scarce (and pretty bad) to non existant, made me to put it away within days. I actually picked up WindowMaker as an excuse to have a peek at Objective-C and play around a bit and see if I could do some silly GUI apps. Is there any good up to date documentation out there for doing GUI development with the GNUStep SDK? All resources that I found seem to be really old. Another WM that I used during my first contact with Linux was BlackBox, though don't know if still alive.
- r0bbbo 2y agoWho does this appeal to and why? I use Rectangle on OSX to give me the layout options I need which basically amounts to switching between full screen and two apps split vertically, then I use the in-built OSX shortcuts for moving apps between screens. What kind of workflows suit something as advanced as Window Maker? Where does the line sit between this and something like Gnome? I'm struggling to get my head around the nuances.
- Tsiklon 2y agoWindow maker is a glimpse into the past. A modern-ish look into the NeXTSTEP UI, which would become OS X’s Aqua. personally it’s my preferred Linux UI. Simply because I find it cozy.
- BarbaryCoast 2y agoI'm using it now. It's my primary wm for all my machines. I don't need a "desktop"; I just want something to manage windows. I don't "drag-n-drop". And I don't systemd, plus I kill as much of the rest of their FreeDesktop.Org code as I possibly can. I've tried to switch to other wms, but I just can't get the same usefulness out of them, and end up switching back.
- frithsun 2y agoI'm in my forties and have been doing ironic retro window managers since I was a teen rocking olvwm on my slackware 486 box in the mid-nineties. Months fade into years, which have faded into decades. My hair is graying and thinning, and the light at the end of the tunnel draws nearer. Yet not one single human soul has ever noticed or cared about my really impressive desktop setup.
- Breadstick 2y agoIs this the window manger that’s shipped with ps2 Linux?
- alexmyczko 2y agoTry wlmaker? https://github.com/phkaeser/wlmaker https://github.com/phkaeser/wlmaker