language choice [LWN.net]

language choice

Posted Feb 3, 2006 15:15 UTC (Fri) by astrophoenix (subscriber, #13528)
In reply to: Openbox: A lightweight window manager (Linux.com) by eru
Parent article: Openbox: A lightweight window manager (Linux.com)

blackbox, which inspired openbox, was implemented in c++. after openbox came out, blackbox
was re-factored to provide a fairly clean, object-oriented interface for all the little utilities to use
(the bbtools, like bbkeys, bbmail, bbpager, etc). the goal being to allow implementation of helper
programs to be much easier.

after seeing that, re-writing openbox in C seems a step backward now that
blackbox is leveraging the power of the object-oriented paradigm.

I'm going to have to give blackbox and openbox a try again, I haven't run either of them in at least a
year now. I've been running ratpoison (when working) and kde (for leisure computing) now

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language choice

Posted Feb 3, 2006 15:22 UTC (Fri) by zooko (subscriber, #2589) [Link]

When ratpoison started locking up too much for me, I switch to IonWM

http://www.modeemi.fi/~tuomov/ion/

I am well satisfied. There have been no crashes or lockups (except something that turned out to be a bug in the old Gtk libs that came with vmware workstation 5.0), the default out-of-the-box UI is usable and attractive (unlike ratpoison, which was usable but repellent), the customization features work fine, etc.

I later found out that IonWM started as a fork of the code of ratpoison. Codebase forks are a wonderful thing -- possibly one of the little-understood core features of Free Software.

language choice

Posted Feb 3, 2006 18:53 UTC (Fri) by astrophoenix (subscriber, #13528) [Link]

how could ratpoison look repellent when it's typically invisible? ;)

language choice

Posted Feb 3, 2006 18:57 UTC (Fri) by astrophoenix (subscriber, #13528) [Link]

belay that, I realize now you weren't talking about the look :D