I finally got it together to release a new version of tritium. Probably
the most exciting feature in this release is that you can allocate an
area of the desktop to be used for a status bar / panel / dock area.
Here is a screenshot of my
desktop showing a working gnome-panel at the bottom.
Debian packages/sources are available here, and from sourceforge. The git repository is here.
The next big task for me will be to add some kind of 'scratchpad' functionality similar to what ion3 has.
update: A number of people have pointed out some missing files in the .deb, so I have posted a 0.3.2-1 to http://vireo.org/debian/tritium/ ; thanks for the feedback.
Today is Independence Day in the United States. A day we are supposed to celebrate freedom by drinking bad beer and watching people make things explode. I figure, what a better way to celebrate freedom than by making a new release of the window manager which is giving me freedom from unreasonable upstream authors? I have just released tritium-0.2. The most interesting change in this release is that it now supports both tabbed desktops and desktops with floating windows. Its still alpha quality, but it is usable. I'm using it full time on my non-work machine.
See my previous post about tritium.
I decided it was finally time to go digging in our boxes of books to find my old Xlib manual. We haven't unpacked any of our books since we moved in August, they are all sitting in boxes in our basement. I went through every box I could find, and, of course, the book I was looking for was really in the very last box in the stack. This was a blessing and curse. A curse for the obvious reason that I had to look through every box, a blessing in that I got to pull out a couple of other books that I've been meaning to get my hands on, such as a couple of key birding books, and my NCJOHB.
Anyway, I return to the couch with my Xlib Programming Manual (which is from R5, but I'm sure is going to answer some questions I have). I of course turn right to the section on window manager, only to find in the first paragraph:
This chapter is not primarily for window manager writers, as those are a rare breed. There are several good customizable window managers available, and there is very little reason for users or application writers to want to write their own. Only a few people in the X community are going to be actively involved in writing window managers, and chances are good they already know all of what is described here"
Heh, what have I gotten myself into?
As many of you know, the recent unfortunate turn of events surrounding ion3 led to its being moved to non-free, that and the fact that the upstream author has become rather difficult to deal with made me decide that I no longer wanted to use that window manager. I really want to stick with a keyboard driven window manager, but am not relly completely satisfied with any of the other choices. I had used ratpoison for a number of years and ran wmii-3, but found both of these lacking in one way or another.
So after a short discussion with Mako, I decided to give writing my own WM a go. (yes, because believe it or not, what the world needs is yet another window manager.) I had previously taken a look at PLWM which is a window manager library written in python, which looked like a pretty good starting point. It gives one some of the basics that you would want in a window manager (for instance, give me clients with a one pixel border, and sloppy pointer focus).
Luckly I recently was on a cruise with my in-laws on a boat with not much to do, and a touch of insomnia so I was able to get a pretty good start on tritium. And now I'm ready to start spreading the word.
Currently the code is alpha quality, but working well enough that I'm using it exclusively on my laptop. But please have a look at it. Tell me what you think. Send me a patch!
I made a public git repository:
$ git clone http://tritium.vireo.org/trunk
You can also get a tarball from sourceforge. And there are debian packages available here
