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Operating Systems Software Windows

IceWM Reaches Version 3 After a Mere 25 Years (theregister.com) 38

A new version of a quarter-century-old window manager shows that there's still room for improvement and innovation, even in established, mature tools. The Register reports: IceWM is [...] a traditional stacking window manager allowing you to open, move, and resize windows. It's relatively simple, easy, and quick to learn. By default, it also provides an app launcher and an app switcher, using the familiar Windows 95 model: a hierarchical start menu and a taskbar. If you do a minimal install of openSUSE, you get IceWM. It's also one of the defaults in the lightweight antiX and Absolute Linux distros.

With such a relatively simple remit, it's good to see that development is still going on. Version 2.0 appeared late in 2020, removing a legacy protocol and adding a new image rendering engine. Now version 3.0 is out with a whole new feature: tabbed windows. Reminiscent of one of The Reg FOSS desk's favorite OSes, the late and great Be OS, tabbed windows turn the title bar into a tab that is less than the full width of the window. In IceWM 3, this allows you to attach windows together to form one entity that can be moved and sized in a single operation â" but the contents of the different windows can be accessed individually using each one's tab. In other words, it works like browser tabs, but the different windows don't need to be from the same parent application.
"IceWM's new tabbed windows are the sort of relatively simple improvement to the very well-established metaphor of window management that this vulture really likes to see: small, elegant, and yet helpful," adds The Register's Liam Proven. "We feel that there's plenty more room for improvement within this space. For instance, very few window managers offer the choice of where the title bar (or tab) is located; on a widescreen, placing them on the side, as wm2 and wmx do, would save valuable vertical pixels."
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IceWM Reaches Version 3 After a Mere 25 Years

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  • IceWM and plenty of other small WMs all seem to share one characteristic: They might be functional but are also extremely ugly to look at. Why?

    • by exomondo ( 1725132 ) on Wednesday October 05, 2022 @08:12PM (#62942575)

      I guess it's because it's subjective, it hasn't changed that much in 25 years because there's no real reason to. The current users like it how it is, there's no real desire to expand its userbase and if you make change for the sake of change then you risk alienating the users you already have.

      Most users don't even really care about the window manager anyway because they use their computer to run programs and the window manager shouldn't make a significant difference to the user experience of running your applications. I use my Linux system to run programs like Chrome, Blender, Houdini and Maya and TBH the window manager really makes no difference to me. So long as it runs the programs I want to run and I can hit the "super" key and start typing the name of it to start it up the OS doesn't really matter either.

      YMMV of course.

      • ...the window manager shouldn't make a significant difference to the user experience of running your applications.

        You're quite right. I too run Linux, and there are several window managers I avoid because they take up too much memory and CPU, they get in my way too much, or both. I'm not so miminalist as those who run IceWM or FWM, but I won't ever work with Gnome or KDE.
    • >"They might be functional but are also extremely ugly to look at. Why?"

      Because you are using the horrible default theme. Try SilverXP or whatnot, and it looks fine. There are hundreds that look MUCH better than the default.

      https://pkgs.org/download/icew... [pkgs.org]

      https://www.box-look.org/brows... [box-look.org]
      https://www.box-look.org/p/151... [box-look.org]
      https://www.box-look.org/p/101... [box-look.org]
      https://www.box-look.org/p/101... [box-look.org]
      https://www.box-look.org/p/101... [box-look.org]
      https://www.box-look.org/p/126... [box-look.org]

    • Because they're small, unpaid, volunteer "teams".

      Nothing gets complained about more than things given away for free.
    • Because implementing a 3D accelerated library to render Aeroglass style* transparency effects does not make a "small" WM.

      You would get an appreciation for this if you ever had to write a display driver for a small LCD which implemented anti-aliasing. It massively raises complexity and size of code to make something look pretty, especially if your UI is drawn and not just a set of loaded bitmaps. Then you could ask, doesn't the OS or another library provide that functionality? Yes, but that doesn't mean your

    • Enlightenment and particularly the E17 fork Moksha look pretty good for their size:

      https://www.bodhilinux.com/moksha-desktop [bodhilinux.com]

  • It is not just Window Managers that have stagnated. UIs have as well or in some cases regressed.

    Case in point: Windows 10 has dumb shit like this where the current state is always shown on the same side:

    (x..) Off

    But when you go to turn it the checkbox ON the label changes:

    (..x) On

    Instead of having a consistent labels on BOTH sides.

    Off (x..) On

    BeOS had a sweet UI where the window title bar was only as wide as needed. You can could slide the window tab left/right to make it easy to switch between different

    • Microsoft still can't figure out to show file extensions by default in Explorer.

      They don't want to - they want / need to protect users from themselves...
      can't have users understanding file types....

    • Glad I’m not the only one bothered by those stupid windows switches.

  • Can someone make a window manager that allows me to scale windows? Note, scaling is different than resizing. When you resize a window, the fonts and images/icons all stay the same size within the window frame. In window scaling everything in the window changes size proportionally (that is, the font size and images should all resize smoothly with the window.) And yes, it is useful, especially when dealing with multiple applications and documents.

    • That's not a window manager task, it's a graphics system task. Window managers manipulate graphical canvases drawn on by applications using X or Wayland ir whatever.

      Whenever a WM like Compiz, for example, does weirdo animations or window effects, what happens under the hood is that it maintains an off screen graphic context (I think that's what it's called, I haven't looked at this for over a decade) that the application renders into using traditional X calls, that it then composites with everything else (p

    • Recently got a 4k monitor for my DAW and Rakarrack (which uses FLTK) looks microscopic and can't be scaled AFAICT. So I have to drag it to a 2nd screen. PITA.
    • Compiz does it.

      KDE might do it, but my desktop just died so I can't tell you, I'm on my Mint MATE laptop.

    • by Lproven ( 6030 )

      Sounds a bit like a ZUI:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      My personal favourite is A2/Bluebottle, based on the Oberon OS.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      (BTW I wrote the article at the top of the post...)

      • Is there a video of that feature in action? I couldn't find one on youtube .. there were a couple of bluebottle videos but it didn't show the window scaling in action.

    • by DrXym ( 126579 )
      That is something the application will have to support. I'm sure it would be possible to have applications respond to a zoom event, or a DPI change but the application still has to implement what it means.
      • Why does the application even have to know? If it's for mouse clicks, the approximate location can be transmit.

    • I wrote X11/Motif programs back in the day that did that. It's generally done at the application level not at the window manager level, because each element (widget) on the screen has to know what to do when told to grow or shrink. It was kind of interesting to do.
      • Why does the application even have to know? If it's for mouse clicks, can't just the approximate location be OK?

        • by znrt ( 2424692 )

          - the application has to know because it is responsible for drawing/redrawing the content in the window client area.
          - the window manager is responsible for letting the user manage the window frame, and notifying the application about changes to it so it can redraw the content.

          it's a sensible architectural approach based on 2 principles: separation of concerns and single source of truth: separation of concerns allows the application to be oblivious of the workings of the window manager and vice-versa, meanin

  • I would say iceWM is one of the easiest to learn to use, and very easy to configure.

    Following the examples, I created a start menu for an elderly, non-technical user, who uses only a mail client, word processor and browser. A couple more choices for hibernate, shutdown, reboot, etc. was all that was needed.

  • by RightwingNutjob ( 1302813 ) on Wednesday October 05, 2022 @07:29PM (#62942493)

    I think I tried just about everything under the sun after kde3 was replaced by kde4. And I settled on Gnome 2. When Gnome 2 was tanked (sabotaged, really) by Gnome 3, I started looking again. I even tried IceWM for a while, I think. But then I found Mate, and with Mate I'll stay.

    Maybe I'll be like the proverbial greybeard wistfully refering to data in terms of "cards" and "records" but I've found my rut and I'm happy in it.

    • Yeah, KDE3 was probably the best damn desktop ever. So configurable, so customizeable, so naturally and intuitively usable. Today's UI designers are useless "I rounded the corners of the tabs and replaced the distinctive multi colored icons with monochrome grey undifferentiated wireframes just like Google/Apple/MS/Adobe/etc did. Look at me I, am helping" drones.

      KD3 does actively live on in Trinity Deskop Evironment. Never tried it, but am meaning to.

      • by markdavis ( 642305 ) on Wednesday October 05, 2022 @09:38PM (#62942733)

        I like KDE a lot (for a heavy-weight desktop), and agree that when it hit 3 it was golden. But I am using KDE 5 at home now for a long time, and it is fine. I don't think it has regressed in any way (like horrible Gnome 3+ did).

        • Other than that they went for activities and never got virtual desktops back where they were in KDE3. Notably the option to have a different backdrop on each virtual desktop is still missing, won't come back, and no, messing with activities won't get you to the same point... Also, missing is the option to select multiple virtual desktops to place windows on, only one or all is sometimes not the desired state. Otherwise, KDE does what I need from it.
          • Yeah, I just never used or needed virtual desktops, so I didn't notice any changes on that from. Plus, I never really understood the point of "activities" and never bothered with them.

      • I prefer KDE5 now. Everything is a lot more discoverable. I can customize what I want, but I don't need to because everything works well enough for most things.

        About the most useful feature of KDE5 that I use now is simply being able to match certain windows/programs/instances and force it to a certain size and position.

        It's especially better if you use a proper KDE distro, like KDE Neon which actually implements KDE properly and uses KDE specific utilities.
    • There are a few bits of Gnome 3 that I liked, but I've jumped ship for Xfce on my Linux laptops. (Xubuntu). It runs beautifully on a 12-year old laptop.

    • I feel the exact same way. I also prefer MATE to MacOS or Windows. MATE is customizable, and is not loaded with useless crap like transparent windows, or bouncing icons.

  • by markdavis ( 642305 ) on Wednesday October 05, 2022 @08:59PM (#62942679)

    I use icewm at work for all our thin client sessions (150 Linux desktops) to our Linux application server (XDMCP). Icewm is fast, simple, familiar, stable, reliable, functional, has a low footprint, is low-bandwidth, is theme-able, and is easy to customize, administer, and lock-down (preventing users from messing it up). It supports most (all?) of the modern protocols and works with all X11 applications. The team is responsive to any found issues and interested in feedback, and has been slowly improving it forever.

    About the only thing it doesn't so that I want is to be able to expand the taskbar across multiple monitors (you have to pick one of them- it defaults to the primary, typically left, monitor).

    Sure, it doesn't have "wobbly windows" or stupid eye-candy, but for some use cases (like ours), it fits the bill perfectly: easy, efficient, small, simple.

  • running it on Slackware-15, imlib2 is reccommended that is not included in Slackware, I prefer window managers over desktop environments, small and light makes the applications i like to run more resoponsive on this old thinkpad,
  • Hadn't used it since Mandrake 7.1
  • Haiku (the BeOS reimplementation as FLOSS) has been doing this for some years, building on BeOS' tabbed title bars (which one could slide with shift-click but that's about it), and implements "stack and tile": you can dock windows by their sides, and stack them so them are grouped, then you can resize them as a whole and move them too. This was a contribution of someone from the Auckland University.

    cf. https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/... [haiku-os.org]

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