Innovations in window management (NewsForge) [LWN.net]

Innovations in window management (NewsForge)

Posted Jan 25, 2005 9:26 UTC (Tue) by cgray4 (guest, #11599)
In reply to: Innovations in window management (NewsForge) by segphault
Parent article: Innovations in window management (NewsForge)

It's like they stole lisp and gave it crappy syntax.

That's a slightly paraphrased quote, but it's pretty much true. Lisp and python are extremely similar -- python is about as verbose as lisp, and it is object-oriented (though I don't see why you would want object-orientation when scripting a window manager).

As far as innovations go, things like ion, ratpoison, and stumpwm are something innovative that I have noticed in the past few years. These are keyboard-driven, tiling window managers. While they may seem like steps backward, I am pretty sure that they are things that have not been done before.

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Tiling WMs

Posted Jan 25, 2005 10:23 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

And, of course, the thing which Ion and suchlike are visibly modelled on: Emacs.

Tiling WMs

Posted Jan 25, 2005 10:56 UTC (Tue) by cgray4 (guest, #11599) [Link]

Is that true? I figured that since the things that they stole from -- er "borrowed from" -- at PARC could have overlapping windows, MS would have been able to replicate that.

Tiling WMs

Posted Jan 25, 2005 15:19 UTC (Tue) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link]

> Is that true?

MSFT Windows 1.01 had modal dialog windows, but AFAIK top-level client windows could not overlap.

http://www.infosatellite.com/news/2001/10/a251001windowsh...

Tiling WMs

Posted Jan 25, 2005 19:44 UTC (Tue) by AJWM (guest, #15888) [Link]

I could be wrong, but I seem to recall that overlapping, vs tiled, were one of the (more than most people give credit for) innovations that Apple added over and above the original Xerox PARC work.

(Mind, Apple had quite a few of the original PARC developers working for them by that point.)

(Or maybe overlapping was just too hard for Microsoft in round one. Do you really want to try dealing with exposure events on DOS?)