
Guile-WM: A Window Manager Toolkit for Guile Scheme - pmoriarty
https://github.com/mwitmer/guile-wm
======
q3sniper
Wow this is great.

I have always wanted to create a window manager ever since I read "The X
Window System: Programming and Applications with Xt, OSF/Motif" years ago but
unfortunately never got around to it and never had the motivation to look
back. This makes it easy. Thanks!

Edit: If you're going to downvote, explain why.

~~~
jcr
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

> _" Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it
> makes boring reading. Please don't bait other users by inviting them to
> downmod you."_

After writing out the text of a comment, stop before you hit the "send"
button, and honestly ask yourself the painfully tough question, "Does my
comment actually _contribute_ to the discussion?"

"Have I asked a good question?" (where "good" means not easily answered with a
bit of effort or a search engine).

"Have a provided a good answer?" (where "good" means not easily answered with
a bit of effort or a search engine).

"Am I a well studied expert with lots of experience in this specific field
such that others on HN will appreciate my personal opinions or anecdotes?"

"Did I add some additional insight or reference?"

"Did I include links to external resources?"

And the most difficult of all, "Did I remember to be civil?"

It's surprising and humbling to realize but in nearly all cases, my personal
opinion fails to matter and is actually just noise. Even a comment that just
says "Thanks!" fails to add much besides noise to the discussion and everyone
is better off if you just silently use the up-vote button to show your
appreciation. Though I personally can't bring myself to down-vote the mostly
useless "Thanks!" comments, I did down-vote your comment for complaining about
down-votes and for essentially baiting for votes. Since you're new here, and
you asked for an explanation for the down-votes you've received, I've given
you the best explanation I can muster. I hope it helps.

------
davexunit
Guile-WM is a very neat project and fun to hack on since, like Emacs, you can
edit it while it runs. It needs some more love to be usable for me as my daily
driver, though. If I could only figure out the cause of a couple of bugs,
things would be good enough for me.

~~~
bitwize
It's not the first WM to be based on Guile, even:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scwm](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scwm)

------
agumonkey
I like reading the config file [https://github.com/mwitmer/guile-
wm/blob/master/wm-init-samp...](https://github.com/mwitmer/guile-
wm/blob/master/wm-init-sample.scm)

a xmonad cousin

------
gexla
see also Guix.

[http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/](http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/)

> Hackable. It provides Guile Scheme APIs, including high-level embedded
> domain-specific languages (EDSLs), to describe how packages are built and
> composed.

~~~
pmoriarty
I wish this was available for FreeBSD.

~~~
davexunit
Want to help port it? :)

------
signa11
iirc, sawfish
([http://sawfish.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page](http://sawfish.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page))
was there a long time ago, but haven't used it in a while...

~~~
diarg
Sawfish rocks, but is implemented in c and scripted through lisp (in a dialect
called "Rep").

Guile-wm is lisp all the way down, is implemented with Guile-xcb, a X client
written completely in Guile.

------
bitwize
It's a cool hack, but with X obsolescent is there much long-term use for it?

~~~
diarg
Wayland provides something similar to xcb, so guile-wayland can be written in
the same way that guile-xcb is.

~~~
bitwize
No, it doesn't. Wayland is far, far different from X, being a protocol for
handling of local framebuffers only. In fact Wayland makes the concept of
window managers obsolete: all window management takes place in the compositor.
So the further development of window managers is a bit akin to solving
yesterday's problems today.

