Window Maker

Last updated
Window Maker
Developer(s) Window Maker developers
Initial release1997;27 years ago (1997)
Stable release
0.96.0 [1]   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg / 5 August 2023
Repository
Operating system Unix-like
Type Window manager
License GPL-2.0-or-later
Website www.windowmaker.org   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg

Window Maker is a free and open-source window manager for the X Window System, allowing graphical applications to be run on Unix-like operating-systems. It is designed to emulate NeXTSTEP's GUI as an OpenStep-compatible environment. [2] Window Maker is part of the GNU Project. [3] [4]

Contents

Overview

Window Maker has been characterized as reproducing "the elegant look and feel of the NeXTSTEP GUI" and is noted as "easy to configure and easy to use." [5] A graphical tool called Wprefs is included and can be used to configure most aspects of the UI. The interface tends towards a minimalist, high performance environment directly supporting XPM, PNG, JPEG, TIFF, GIF and PPM icons with an alpha-channel and a right-click, sliding-scrolling application menu system which can throw off pinnable menus, along with window-icon miniaturization and other animations on multiple desktops. Menus and preferences can be changed without restarting. As with most window managers it supports themes and many are available. Owing to its NeXT inspiration, Window Maker has a dock like macOS, but Window Maker's look and feel hews mostly to that of its NeXT forebear.

Architecture

Window Maker has window hints which allow seamless integration with the GNUstep, GNOME, KDE, Motif and OpenLook environments. Significantly it has almost complete ICCCM compliance and internationalization support for at least 11 locales. Window Maker uses the lightweight WINGs widget set which was built specifically for Window Maker as a way to skirt what its developers said would have been the "overkill" (or bloat) of using GNUstep. [6] WINGs is common to other applications including a login display manager called WINGs Display Manager (WDM) and many dockapps. Window Maker dock and clip applets are compatible with those from AfterStep's wharf.

History

Window Maker was written from scratch primarily by Brazilian programmer Alfredo Kojima as a window manager for the GNUstep desktop environment and originally meant as an improved take on the AfterStep window manager's design concept. The first release was in 1997. [7] For a time it was included as a standard window manager in several Linux distributions and is also available in the FreeBSD and OpenBSD ports collection. [8] Since the goal of the project has been to closely emulate the design of the defunct NeXTstep and OpenStep GUIs, further development has been light. In late 2007 the widely available, stable release version was at 0.92 from July 2005 with subsequent maintenance updates having been made to some distribution packages and ports. [9] [10]

In late June 2008 a post on the project's website said active development would resume, noting, "...we are working very hard to revitalize Window Maker's presence on X Window (and perhaps beyond) desktops... We expect to once again provide the de-facto minimalist yet extremely functional window manager to the world." [11] On 29 January 2012, Window Maker 0.95.1 was released, making it the first official release in almost seven years. This was followed by a number of releases; As of October 2023 the latest release was 0.96,0, released on 5 August 2023. [12]

Name

The program's name, a pun on the term widowmaker, was originally WindowMaker (camel cased and without the space) but a naming conflict arose with an older product called Windowmaker from Windowmaker Software Ltd, a UK company producing software for companies that manufacture windows and doors. A 1998 agreement between the developers of Window Maker and Windowmaker Software specified that Window Maker (in the X sense) should never be used as a single word.

Usage

Adhering closely to the NeXT interface, the default appearance can be confusing to someone expecting a Microsoft Windows-style taskbar and start menu. All applications can be accessed by right-clicking on the desktop background to access the fully configurable main menu. The menu can also be displayed using the keyboard, with F12 for the application menu and F11 for a window menu.

Manjaro OpenRC desktop with wmaker A full wmaker desktop run on top of manjaro openrc.jpg
Manjaro OpenRC desktop with wmaker

Window Maker can be configured by double-clicking the screwdriver icon on the dock. An icon depicting a computer monitor is used to launch a command-window and a paperclip icon is used to cycle between workspaces. Any icon in Window Maker, including application icons, can be easily changed.

Icons representing running applications appear at the bottom of the screen (the user can extend application windows to cover these). By default, the dock appears at upper right. Icons can be dragged onto the dock to make them permanent. The edge of an icon can be right-clicked to adjust its settings. A separate, dockable application called wmdrawer features a slide-out drawer which can hold application and file launching icons.

Basic apps

WPrefs graphical configuration tool Windowmaker colour preferences.png
WPrefs graphical configuration tool

While any X application can be docked in Window Maker, the archetypical WM dockable applications are called dockapps. These tend to be clocks and system monitoring applications. There are many clock implementations, including wmcalclock, wmtime, wmclock (a NeXTStep-like calendar clock clone) and wmclockmon. Monitoring applets include wmload, wmavgload, wmmon, wmnet and wmnd. Many other dockapps are available, typically ones intended to interact with other "full fledged" applications.

The WPrefs configuration tool enables tuning of most Window Maker preferences. wmakerconf was developed to provide more configuration options, notably theme customization. Configuration files are typically stored in ~/GNUstep/. The background can be changed from the command line with wmsetbg -s -u [filename.jpg] (wmsetbg stands for "window maker set background").

FSViewer is a separate, configurable Miller Columns file browser developed for Window Maker in 1998 by George Clernon as a visual and functional analogy to NeXTstep's Workspace Manager. In 2002, it was adapted to later versions of the WINGs libraries and Window Maker by Guido Scholz. [13]

aterm is an rxvt based terminal emulator developed for Afterstep mainly for visual appeal, featuring a NeXTstep style scrollbar (which matches Window Maker's look and feel) along with pseudo-transparency.

The application menu can be edited graphically with much versatility. The configuration is recorded in ~/GNUstep/Defaults/WMRootMenu as a text file which can be easily read and edited (in versions after 0.94.0 it can also be automatically generated from a list of installed applications using a program called wmgenmenu).

Menu items can be set to:

Many Linux distributions define their own applications menu for Window Maker. This cannot usually be edited using the configuration tool (which will instead offer to replace it with a generic default menu which can be edited).

Mascot

Amanda the Panda, mascot of Window Maker Amanda the panda mascot of window maker.png
Amanda the Panda, mascot of Window Maker

Amanda the Panda is the mascot of Window Maker. She was designed by Agnieszka Czajkowska. [14] [15]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Context menu</span> User interface element

A context menu is a menu in a graphical user interface (GUI) that appears upon user interaction, such as a right-click mouse operation. A context menu offers a limited set of choices that are available in the current state, or context, of the operating system or application to which the menu belongs. Usually the available choices are actions related to the selected object. From a technical point of view, such a context menu is a graphical control element.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of the graphical user interface</span>

The history of the graphical user interface, understood as the use of graphic icons and a pointing device to control a computer, covers a five-decade span of incremental refinements, built on some constant core principles. Several vendors have created their own windowing systems based on independent code, but with basic elements in common that define the WIMP "window, icon, menu and pointing device" paradigm.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">NeXTSTEP</span> Operating system from NeXT Computer

NeXTSTEP is a discontinued object-oriented, multitasking operating system based on the Mach kernel and the UNIX-derived BSD. It was developed by NeXT Computer, founded by Steve Jobs, in the late 1980s and early 1990s and was initially used for its range of proprietary workstation computers such as the NeXTcube. It was later ported to several other computer architectures.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OpenStep</span> Defunct object-oriented application programming interface specification

OpenStep is an object-oriented application programming interface (API) specification that was developed by NeXT Computer. It provides a framework for building graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and developing software applications. OpenStep was designed to be platform-independent, allowing developers to write code that could run on multiple operating systems, including NeXTSTEP, Windows NT, and various Unix-based systems. It has influenced the development of other GUI frameworks, such as Cocoa for macOS and GNUstep.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GNUstep</span> Open source widget toolkit and application development tools

GNUstep is a free software implementation of the Cocoa Objective-C frameworks, widget toolkit, and application development tools for Unix-like operating systems and Microsoft Windows. It is part of the GNU Project.

In computing, a desktop environment (DE) is an implementation of the desktop metaphor made of a bundle of programs running on top of a computer operating system that share a common graphical user interface (GUI), sometimes described as a graphical shell. The desktop environment was seen mostly on personal computers until the rise of mobile computing. Desktop GUIs help the user to easily access and edit files, while they usually do not provide access to all of the features found in the underlying operating system. Instead, the traditional command-line interface (CLI) is still used when full control over the operating system is required.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fluxbox</span> Open source window manager for the X11 system

Fluxbox is a stacking window manager for the X Window System, which started as a fork of Blackbox 0.61.1 in 2001, with the same aim to be lightweight. Its user interface has only a taskbar, a pop-up menu accessible by right-clicking on the desktop, and minimal support for graphical icons. All basic configurations are controlled by text files, including the construction of menus and the mapping of key-bindings. Fluxbox has high compliance to the Extended Window Manager Hints specification.

The Dock is a prominent feature of the graphical user interface of macOS. It is used to launch applications and to switch between running applications. The Dock is also a prominent feature of macOS's predecessor NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP operating systems. The earliest known implementations of a dock are found in operating systems such as RISC OS and NeXTSTEP. iOS has its own version of the Dock for the iPhone and iPod Touch, as does iPadOS for the iPad.

The taskbar is a graphical user interface element that has been part of Microsoft Windows since Windows 95, displaying and facilitating switching between running programs. The taskbar and the associated Start Menu were created and named in 1993 by Daniel Oran, a program manager at Microsoft who had previously collaborated on great ape language research with the behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner at Harvard.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">AfterStep</span> Stacking window manager for the X Window System

AfterStep is a stacking window manager for the X Window System. The goal of AfterStep's development is to provide for flexibility of desktop configuration, improved aesthetics and efficient use of system resources, and was used in such distributions as MachTen. AfterStep originally was a variant of FVWM modified to resemble NeXTSTEP, but as the development cycle progressed, it diverged from its FVWM roots. In 2000, Linux website TuxRadar selected AfterStep as one of the year's best window managers, praising it as "fast and reliable, with a huge range of configuration options and the ability to create some spectacular themes".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Window manager</span> Type of system software

A window manager is system software that controls the placement and appearance of windows within a windowing system in a graphical user interface. Most window managers are designed to help provide a desktop environment. They work in conjunction with the underlying graphical system that provides required functionality—support for graphics hardware, pointing devices, and a keyboard—and are often written and created using a widget toolkit.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mac OS X Server 1.0</span> Server operating system developed by Apple

Mac OS X Server 1.0 is an operating system developed by Apple, Inc. released on March 16, 1999. it was the first version of Mac OS X Server.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Virtual desktop</span> User interfaces describe ways in which virtual space of a computers desktop is expanded

In computing, a virtual desktop is a term used with respect to user interfaces, usually within the WIMP paradigm, to describe ways in which the virtual space of a computer's desktop environment is expanded beyond the physical limits of the screen's display area through the use of software. This compensates limits of the desktop area and is helpful in reducing clutter of running graphical applications.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">IRIX Interactive Desktop</span> Computer software desktop environment

IRIX Interactive Desktop is a discontinued desktop environment normally used as the default desktop on Silicon Graphics workstations running IRIX. The IRIX Interactive Desktop uses the Motif widget toolkit on top of the X Window System found on most Unix systems. The default window manager on the IRIX Interactive Desktop is 4Dwm.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Interface Builder</span> Developer Application for MacOS

Interface Builder is a software development application for Apple's macOS operating system. It is part of Xcode, the Apple Developer developer's toolset. Interface Builder allows Cocoa and Carbon developers to create interfaces for applications using a graphical user interface. The resulting interface is stored as a .nib file, short for NeXT Interface Builder, or more recently, as an XML-based .xib file.

A menu bar is a graphical control element which contains drop-down menus.

In NeXTSTEP, OPENSTEP, and their lineal descendants macOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, and watchOS, and in GNUstep, a bundle is a file directory with a defined structure and file extension, allowing related files to be grouped together as a conceptually single item.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tiling window manager</span> Window manager with non-overlapping frames

In computing, a tiling window manager is a window manager with an organization of the screen into mutually non-overlapping frames, as opposed to the more common approach of coordinate-based stacking of overlapping objects (windows) that tries to fully emulate the desktop metaphor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Miller columns</span>

Miller columns are a browsing/visualization technique that can be applied to tree structures. The columns allow multiple levels of the hierarchy to be open at once, and provide a visual representation of the current location. It is closely related to techniques used earlier in the Smalltalk browser, but was independently invented by Mark S. Miller in 1980 at Yale University. The technique was then used at Project Xanadu, Datapoint, and NeXT.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dreamlinux</span>

Dreamlinux was a Brazilian computer operating system based on Debian Linux. It can boot as a live CD, from USB flash drive, or can be installed on a hard drive. The distribution's GUI aims to have a centered animated toolbar. As of October 2012, The Dreamlinux Project has been discontinued.

References

  1. ↑ "Version 0.96.0 released". 5 August 2023. Retrieved 7 August 2023.
  2. ↑ Window Maker, freshports.org, retrieved 2012-01-12, Window Maker is an X11 window manager designed to give additional integration support to the GNUstep Desktop Environment. In every way possible, it reproduces the elegant look and feel of the NeXTSTEP[tm] GUI. It is fast, feature rich, easy to configure, and easy to use. In addition, Window Maker works with GNOME and KDE, making it one of the most useful and universal window managers available.
  3. ↑ "GNU" . Retrieved 25 June 2012.
  4. ↑ "Window Maker" . Retrieved 25 June 2012.
  5. ↑ Window Maker, freshports.org, archived from the original on 2008-05-16, retrieved 2012-01-12
  6. ↑ Development, Windowmaker.info, archived from the original on August 11, 2007, retrieved 2007-12-11
  7. ↑ Chapman, Mark, Window Maker, Freshmeat.net, retrieved 2012-01-12
  8. ↑ CVS Archive, freebsd.org, retrieved 2012-01-12
  9. ↑ News Archive, windowmaker.info, archived from the original on October 31, 2007, retrieved 2007-12-11
  10. ↑ Window Maker, portsmon.freebsd.org, retrieved 2012-01-12
  11. ↑ Window Maker: Home, windowmaker.info, 2008-06-30, archived from the original on 2008-08-07, retrieved 2008-09-19
  12. ↑ Window Maker: News
  13. ↑ FSViewer, freebsdports.info, retrieved 2007-12-12
  14. ↑ Team, Window Maker Web. "Window Maker - Mascot". kfo.ath.cx. Retrieved 2017-07-20.
  15. ↑ Pugh, Richard (10 February 2017). "Window Maker's forgotten mascot". cyberbard.net. Archived from the original on 15 Oct 2021. Retrieved 24 September 2022.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.