[gambit-list] window manager in gambit

lowly coder lowlycoder at huoyanjinjing.com
Thu Feb 19 02:20:33 EST 2009


What C code base is good to start with?

(I'm familiar with Gambit's FFI -- wrapped parts of OpenCV for my own use).
However, I don't know about X11 to "just write one from scratch".

Thanks!

On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 10:47 PM, David Rush <kumoyuki at gmail.com> wrote:

> 2009/2/19 Vincent St-Amour <stamourv at iro.umontreal.ca>:
> >> No offense intended, but I think re-implementing window managers in
> >> Haskell/Scheme/<current language of choice> seems a bit
> >> Not-Invented-Here syndrome-ish. If it ain't broke, don't fix it -
> >> since there's lots of other interesting things to fix/create.
>
> Yes and no. The WM is one of your most intimate connections to the
> system and there's a lot to be said for what you learn in writing one.
> That said:
>
> > I'm currently using stumpWM (a tiling WM written in Common Lisp), and
> > I find it quite nice to be able to add code on the fly to the WM, and
> > to be able to extend it in Lisp rather than in some configuration file
> > with its own syntax. I'd compare it to emacs for extensibility.
>
> Which is exactly my point. And you can learn an awful lot about UI
> design (at least how *you* like to relate to the machine) from hacking
> on a properly extensible WM. Such as:
>
> > Of course, having a window manager running with Gambit would be even
> > better. SCWM (Scheme Constraints Window Manager) could be a nice
> > starting point, but does not seem to have been updated since 2000.
>
> And SCWM was the proximate cause for me to learn Scheme. I had become
> interested in Lisps through hacking on emacs and wanted a WM that was
> similarly flexible. SCWM's death has been a great disappointment to
> me, it was a great WM. But I don't think you'll find its code is a
> good starting point. For one, it was pretty intimately tied into the
> Guile of the time - which sucked; and it also did a lot of work in C -
> which also sucked. A fresh start using Gambit's excellent FFI for
> connecting to the X11 libraries would be the way to go about it. On
> the other hand SCWM could be a goo candidate for design-level reuse.
>
> But the gripping hand is that you will have to rewrite it from
> scratch. That's not a small job, but it's also not huge.
>
> david
> --
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