[gambit-list] window manager in gambit

Pavel Dudrenov dudrenov at gmail.com
Thu Feb 19 02:57:27 EST 2009


IMO, all you care for is examples of small WMs written in C talking to
X11. Write that core functionality as FFIs for gambit and the rest is
all you. Rat Poison and fluxbox are really small, ~20kloc afair, and
relatively easy to read. Take a look at them. Or look at the source of
your wm of choice.

Pavel
P.S.
In the end you will end up having to familiarize yourself with the
various X11 libraries anyway. That's probably gonna be the worse part.

On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 11:20 PM, lowly coder
<lowlycoder at huoyanjinjing.com> wrote:
> 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
>> --
>> GPG Public key at http://cyber-rush.org/drr/gpg-public-key.txt
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